[hackerspaces] Software Licensing

[Eric Michaud]

The rule of the land at Pumping Station: One is, and is pretty easy to
adhere to. Legally Licensed Software. ONLY! PERIOD! End of Story!

If someone wants to run something proprietary, then can of course procure it
any way they legally see fit.

So that covers anything GPL'd or otherwise.

Example:

Right now Autodesk is doing a student rate, either free, or around 150$ for
AutoCAD Inventor. I'm looking into it for a few projects, because SketchUp,
even Sketchup Pro doesn't do a lot of the things I'm looking to do. Also it
just has the polish that the free don't currently have for engineering CAD.

Theory:

I know that might come as a surprise to some on this list , but here's the
thing, we have a bunch of legal copies of XP around since not everyone uses
them when they got goes into a pool. And/or people pitch in for specific
software if it's not readily accessible or they are not writing new code
themselves. It's a matter of legality and convenience. If you want to try
and take a run and do it without that your chances *astronomical* fees (for
lawyers and back paying for copies) if you didn't buy it legally in the
first place. I would love all software to be free as in beer, but you do
have to notice something about open source, very often is free as in freedom
to change the code, not free as in beer. People just got to eat sometimes
and pay rent.

As an aside:

I personally run Ubuntu on most my things systems except for servers running
some form of *BSD or otherwise, but until we have enough clout to say we're
not going buy or use X until you do Y, that won't change. It's just simple
economics. When we make it more enticing to have them give away the
software, that means we've been able to provide another way for someone to
earn a living. That's an idea I can get behind. Creative ways to approach
business without gouging. Which means people can work on software without
the normal issues that might have come with it previously.

New Theory:

I'm for the ideal of "Bits for Free but Pay for Atoms". Even though bits
aren't really free.

Cheers,

-Eric.

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:38 PM, tetsu yatsu <tetsuharu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Members and non-members are asking that we get proprietary software on our
> systems, like Adobe CS3, Windows XP, and OSX.  I've actually been
> exclusively using open-source software the past few years, and didn't really
> consider that someone would want to run these things.
>
> Naturally, they feel that being a 'hacker'space, we have no concept of
> intellectual property and have no problems stealing software and installing
> pirated, potentially infected software on our lab computers.  But, being a
> nonprofit, we are going to get audited at some point, and I wouldn't want a
> bunch of bootleg installs of Windows to ruin our message.
>
> Likewise, a lot of people try to offer us pirated software and MSDN access.
> (Is it legal to share MSDN access? Shouldn't we just get our own MSDN
> account?)
>
> So far, I'm considering a policy where we only install software we have
> valid licenses for on lab computers, hopefully with a non-profit discount,
> but members may run whatever they want on their own machines they bring in
> since the space is not liable.
>
>
>
> I know some of you are very supportive of changes in intellectual property
> laws, but those of us following the laws until then, any advice?
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
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