ypid-geberit

@Musashi @jchd Jup, I am located in Germany. You can give me the links if you want to. I should know the basics already I hope 😉 It is a complex subject, as always when you look closer into something. Sure the countries handle this differently. That is one reason I like software licenses because they express the wish of the author with the knowledge that not every statement of the license is effective in every country. With this, most of the wishes you have are effective. For example the GPL has been subject of many court cases around the world already and it has proven to work. "level of creativity": You are right. But for a long UDF file, this should definitely apply. A note about the Creative Commons that has been mentioned. This license family, except maybe the public domain variants, are not suitable for software projects. That just as a reminder.

@BrewManNH Thanks for your input. I agree with you. The sentence you quoted should be seen in the context of "Author did not state any license and someone publishes a (modified) copy". That was probably not 100 % clear. Anyway. I appreciate that you thought about this and made a decision +1

I would be interested in this but for some reason I cannot access it "Sorry, we can't show this content because you do not have permission to see it." (check this post while not being logged in/in private mode). I already did some quick search in the forum.

To summary, the issue is not that I am not allowed to use UDFs or even modify them as long as it stays inside a company. It only becomes an issue when you want to be kind to your fellow AutoIt users around the world and share that derivative work. Can’t we instead just improve the basis on that we work and share here in this forum to clarify this? Maintain my own UDF sounds redundant to me.

Thanks for you feedback. I also understand that software licenses are not common in this forum and how this came to be. This is a general issue that should be addressed to be on the safe side. At least for UDFs that are basically libraries, authors should assign a license when they post their work. Otherwise, nothing will improve, people come and go and now we have the situation were there is some code but legally I would be required to rewrite it from scratch if I wanted to use/modify it in my work and properly publish it. Everything else is simply not legal. Some community/collective understanding of "All code posted here is free" is nice but legally not tough. (I assume you mean "Public domain". You could also mean Free Software licenses like the GPL. I can hardly tell). This scares people like me who would like to improve some UDFs but effectively can’t. The thing I could probably do is to publish patches (that can be applied with the Unix `patch` command), but not the original code itself. > just recognise the people that provided code in your project when no firm license model was defined The jurisdiction I know (Germany and basic knowledge of the US), you are not allowed to simply do that. Note that I am not a lawyer.

I would like to discuss this further and to not have such a principle discussion here, I created this thread: @Jos I hope you don’t mind.

Hi I come from a GNU/Linux, Python background and are usually more at home on GitLab and GitHub. There it is very common that authors pick a license they like and release software under such a license. This makes it clear what usage the author wants to allow and so on. Now I am involved with AutoIt for some time now and recently published some code which I thought could be useful for others (https://github.com/geberit/e2e-tests). There I make use of some nice UDFs (thanks for sharing!). The issue is that the legal status of the UDFs is unclear to me so I cannot share nor share a modified copy of those UDFs along. I now started to ask the authors of those UDFs if they could resolve this uncertainty and got a response from @Jos stating that: I appreciate such a statement. The issue is that it is not very precise. Software licenses cover this much better and legally binding. Without a clear statement from the autor(s) of some code, the default copyright applies which does not grant very much. Sharing of (modified) copies for example is not allowed by default. This makes collaborative improvements or usage kinda dangerous. I think it could be helpful to get awareness for this. Can it maybe be added to? Lets discuss

@MHz Thanks very much for this UDF! To use this properly in projects, it needs to be clear under which software license you want this UDF to be used. Can you pick one maybe https://choosealicense.com Thank you again!

@Ward @Jos Thanks very much for this UDF! To use this properly in projects, it needs to be clear under which software license you want this UDF to be used. Can you pick one maybe https://choosealicense.com Thank you again! Offtopic: Excuse the double post. I did not find a way to edit the first one?