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A couple of things... First a clerical error, in your italicized quote from the Oculus Terms of Service (which aren't even the developer terms of service, it turns out... see https://share.oculus.com/developer-distribution-agreement for the actual developer terms.) You are including the commentary of the article's author; true he/she didn't clearly indicate that they interspersed their commentary in the terms they quoted, but still... Second, my criticism of the original article (now deleted evidently) was that the author was being hypersensitive and using unwarranted hyperbole to describe a situation they didn't like (and which we now know they misread). My goal is to demonstrate that people, even online, should put forth well reasoned and balanced arguments when stating their case rather than making ham-handed efforts to evoke emotional responses in the absence of any real insight. I bet that author would have been not only fine with, but supportive of certain open source licenses that, really do result in granting the same rights as Oculus was asking for. Third, you're comparing apples and oranges leading to a completely invalid analysis. you're comparing the rights being granted by the Licensor (the terms you quote from Oculus user terms) and the requirements of the Licensee in the MIT License. Of course they're different... because they're addressing different parties in the agreement. To make the comparison accurate, compare the Licensee terms of the Oculus and those of the MIT License: Oculus (User TOS): By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services. MIT License: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so[clip] So consider this: I write some fancy-shmancy application and put it on GitHub under the MIT License. Someone comes along... hell, let's say someone acting on behalf of Oculus, and forks that repo and uses the application (perhaps even without modification) in the Oculus store. Well, so long as they comply with the one requirement (reposting of the MIT License in the code) do they not get the same rights? Can I revoke the rights under MIT License... nope. Can I stop them from sublicensing or reselling my software, even if I don't get a cut? Nope. Oh wait... they have to make public any changes they make and publish full source... oh... nope. In practice, what you give up by even agreeing to the Oculus terms as posted by the article author isn't all that different in practice to what you give up as an IP owner when you choose a permissive open source license. The only real difference is in how the license originates: one case you're offering terms (MIT License) which can be accepted by a Licensee and in the Oculus case they are telling you on which terms they will be your Licensee, take it or leave it. And moreover, I see nothing in the original terms posted that would prevent the IP owner from also licensing the content under any sort of open source license (restrictive or permissive). The contrast was intended to point out how people get all huffy when a company wants you to agree to permissive rights ("evil", "nondemocratic"[sic], etc)... but then find it just fine when you give essentially the same rights when you license something as open source. To me, this is something of a double standard. Finally, when someone disagrees with you they are not trolling. You're welcome to argue the case otherwise, but calling my points trolling out-of-hand furthers my arguments about the loss of perspective in online forums. (Last caveat... I have not really read the actual terms of services for developers since that link has now appeared in the comments). |