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It seems to me that lphilips54 is trying to achieve with a license what we would need a patent for. (He speaks of his algorithm)

Exactly. Copyright doesn't do what he thinks it does.

Note that he has a patent on metaphone3.

Can you link to that? I've only been able to find rejected applications so far.

As far as anybody can tell and based on his comments, no he doesn't have any patents. He mistakenly thought his algorithm was copyrighted and algorithms are not copyrightable in US and generally in many countries around the globe.

It's surprising how little understanding the average person has of the 3 major types of IP registration. Most people I know working in creative and artistic fields could not tell you the difference between a copyright, patent and trademark.

Why surprising? They're all very abstract concepts, and most artists outside the tech field don't have a use for patents or trademarks.

I often have observed issues involving people who believe they or others own processes, algorithms and names, or that others have exclusive right to such in the visual and tangible art fields. It's quite important to understand what rights people have when they start asserting rights. For instance, a bead maker claiming that they have a 'copyright' on a certain style of glass bead which they seem to think involves a combination of the name, process and result. People use (mis) understandings of IP to intimidate others into not competing with them, despite not understanding what rights they actually have or don't have. The intended audience, other artists, don't understand what rights they or the claimant actually have, either. The main lack of understanding I see is a) that processes cannot be covered by copyright and b) names are not covered by copyright.

The lesson that I'm taking from this is he should have talked to a lawyer.

Indeed.

It also strikes me as odd that someone who creates intellectual rights for a living (i.e. a software developer), as an independent, does not have a basic understanding of copyright law.

I'm not a lawyer, but some basic understanding is at least to be expected. Still, sucks for him though.

> does not have a basic understanding of copyright law

I think that this is more a case of the "unknown unknowns." He probably thought that he did have a good grasp of copyright law and that was why he didn't need to talk to a lawyer.

It's an interesting question whether the license is even valid if it is true what you say that he never understood its consequences as you suggest.

>if you don't intend it to be re-usable, then you shouldn't pick a permissive, open source license such as BSD.

Any open source license is going to pose the same "problem". If you don't want it to be open source, don't make it open source. Permissive license doesn't even enter into it.

Not really.

Most Atlassian products are "Open Source" in that after purchase you can download their source code.

You are still not allowed to repackage it / modify it and sell derivative products / run multiple instances of it though.

Open source has well accepted definition and its not the one you are using.

Hence the 'quotes.' Seems pretty relevant as this article is all about the author understanding open source in the way Atlassian e.a. do it.

The open source initiative (OSI) was the organization that originally promoted open source (as an alternative to the FSF and "free software"), along with certifying licenses as being "open source". Perhaps it's a generational thing for those that weren't old enough or weren't paying attention in 1998 - they even tried unsuccessfully to trademark "open source" to avoid the sorts of confusions with what Atlassian (or even Splunk) have.

That said I'd say the problem with the OP thread isn't even about "open source", it's about misunderstanding copyright vs. patents.

The term you are looking for is "Source-available".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-sour...

The first sentence of that paragraph being:

  Although the OSI definition of "open source software" is
  widely accepted, a small number of people and organizations 
  use the term to refer to software where the source is
  available for viewing, but which may not legally be
  modified or redistributed.

Which is exactly the point I wanted to make: that there is no one true definition of open source and that, although most technically inclined people agree, there is room for confusion/disagreement.

If these sorts of contributions are worthy of downvotes these days then I really don't know what I'm doing here anymore :S

Yes really. Atlassian products that are not using an open source license have nothing to do with open source licenses.