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0 pointsmoron4hire11y ago0 comments

No, the license says everyone can use it, but I'm not aware of anything other than Creative Commons that explicitly transfers ownership in anyway.

At the end of the day, the project creator gets to say how his or her code is used. If this continues to be an issue, then people are going to start coming up with new licenses that explicitly state their wishes that setting up these types of bug bounty systems are not a right that is granted.

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jordigh11y ago· 1 in thread

The concept of "ownership" is not clear when you're using a free license. The only thing that is clearly owned is the copyright, but a free license gives everyone all the freedom they could possibly want with the software other than put their own copyright on it, so it's almost like they "own" it too.[1]

So yes, all free licenses allow you to do something like sell support for the software or charge money for improving it with your own private patches. If they didn't, companies like Red Hat or Collabora couldn't exist.

Except for its copyright, everyone "owns" free software.

[1] This is actually even better than when you buy software under a EULA. Most EULAs say something like "the software is licensed, not sold", explicitly reminding you that you're paying for the permission to use the software and that you don't own it.

moron4hireOP11y ago

No, the concept of ownership is quite clear, hence why the FSF requires copyright assignments on GNU projects. Licenses like the GPL do not work without a good understanding that the person with the copyright has ownership of it. Without that ownership, it is impossible to make the demands of the license.

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