GPL, WordPress and Themes

I saw an intriguing post the other day by Jennifer Schiffer on WordPress, themes and the GPL.  She linked to a video of Matt Mullenweg (one of WordPress’ lead developers) who was talking about why WordPress was a GPL product (short answer: they didn’t really have a choice because WP is based on b2, which [...]

Cnet author advocates theft

I’m simply stunned by a recent article written by Cnet columnist Rafe Needleman. In his post, he blatently advocates buying “lesser” versions of Microsoft products to take advantages of the discounts available to certain classes of users, regardless of whether you actually fall into that user class.  His cavalier attitude towards the vendor (telling his [...]

Amazon’s Orwellian Behavior

As many are reporting, Amazon.com “recalled” an e-book remotely in response to a request by a publisher.  This is all kinds of scary and most folks are centered on the purely tangible nature of the problem.  I’m also concerned about the precent it sets, but I’m more concerned about the sapping of intellectual property rights [...]

License Resale

Vinnie Mirchandani at deal architect pointed out a Ray Wang article on the resale of unused licenses.  My thoughts are in the comments on Ray’s article.  But generally speaking, regardless of what Ray suggests, you can’t do it in the US (or the rest of the Berne Convention countries) under most licenses which have express [...]

A Few Licensing Issues with Amazon

Many of the technologies we use every day come with a license agreement of some sort.  You might not even realize that it’s so because of where you are in the transaction chain – either as a buyer or as a seller.  Content, for instance, is created, licensed/sold, packaged, re-licensed/re-sold, bundled, re-licensed/re-sold, and on and [...]

Customer Audits of Your Contracts

I was recently asked whether I would ever allow a customer to audit my contracts.  The simple answer is No! Of course, the original question wasn’t this simple.  The person asking the question had some interesting constraints.  Specifically, they were licensing software on an exclusive basis, with exclusivity carved out by geographic region.  So a [...]

Salesforce.com calls for End of Maintenance

Below is the contents of an internal salesforce.com memo CEO Marc Benioff shared with Vinnie Mirchandani (and posted on his blog: deal architect).  I’m pasting it here for simplicity’s sake and because of the power of the message itself. “For ten years, we’ve been driven by a simple vision: The End of Software.  Now it’s [...]

Internal Business Purposes

How many licenses to your core database software do you own?  I ask about this specific type of license because database software is typically expensive (relatively speaking) and customers license an exact quantity of licenses required based on actual use.  In other words, if you need 5 database servers (or instances), you pay for 5 [...]

Grape Licensing

I saw this the other day: and I’ve been thinking about the implications…  is it really possible to add this type of condition?  I think I agree with Madisonian’s evaluation of the situation, assuming that the grapes are patented.  But what if they’re not patented?  Can you restrict usage of a purchased good?  Thoughts would [...]

More on using other people’s work

I’ve written before on the topic of using other people’s work as the basis for your contracts. Google apparently didn’t learn that they need to not necessarily borrow from themselves, either, for the EULA related to Google’s new browser, Chrome. But the bigger issue in this new EULA from Google were the terms itself.  Specifically, [...]

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