Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by halite 2901 days ago
How do you interpret these licensing terms:

License Copyright (c) Mihir Chaturvedi. All rights reserved. Licensed under the MIT License.

If Mihir has all rights reserved, what's the purpose of adding MIT with it?

4 comments

Open source license does not mean giving up intellectual property rights. You can only license the work if you own the rights to the work.

MIT License starts with copyright notice:

    Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
    obtaining a copy of this software and associated 
    documentation files (the "Software"), to deal ....
OTOH, you don't need to say "All rights reserved" to hold your rights:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved

It's standard to use both “All rights reserved” along with explicit permissions to be explicit that all rights under copyright not explicitly granted are reserved. It is, in intent, a disclaimer of additional implied permissions, though IIRC the “All rights reserved” in practice has no legal effect.
MIT is how the work can be used by others. This is basically saying "hey, I claim all the intellectual property rights granted to me by law. However, if you use this software strictly under these terms (MIT), I will not consider it to be infringing upon my rights."
Isnt't "All rights reserved" typical language, even with open source licenses?
No, it's generally "Copyright <name>" to explain where the license is coming from, but a copyright license is the exact opposite of "all rights reserved".
No, not really. The phrase itself has no legal significance any more, anyway, but even if it did, this would basically work like an ACL:

    Allow MIT terms
    Deny *  # all rights reserved (implied)
Am I using it under MIT terms? Allowed. Otherwise not.
That is not in fact true on either point. Some legal significance remained for a while, and it is not nor was like an ACL.

* http://jdebp.info./FGA/law-copyright-all-rights-reserved.htm...