Jonathan Bennett (11:54)
I know, and it's not as bad as it sounds. Okay, so the 7.1 the actual publishing of Content, but it actually says without prejudice to any ownership rights of user of Content, which is defined below, which user publishes. So the Content which user publishes for the purpose of allowing the functioning of the platform and the Services, which includes the Forum and the Project Hub, user grants to Arduino the so here's the grant the non exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub licensable, perpetual, irrevocable to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law for the duration of intellectual property rights and without detriment to user statutory rights Right to use the Content published and or updated on the platform, as well as to distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish and make publicly visible all material including software library is blah blah blah blah or other data Collectively the Content that user publishes, uploads or otherwise makes available to Arduino throughout the world using any means and for any purpose, including the use of any username or nickname specified in relation to the Content. Should the Content be software? Should the Content be software created by the user pursuant to the Contributor License Agreement? Such Content shall be subject to the terms of the Contributor License Agreement. User expressly acknowledges that Content may include users personal data, where applicable, personal data of minors for whom the user is legal guardian and if you are not familiar with actually parsing legalese. Yeah, that may sound terrifying, but this is really sort of just boilerplate for hey, we're running a cloud service. You give us data that is intended to then be publicly viewable. We want to make sure that our license says that when you give us data, you can make it, we can make it publicly visible. This pushes back against a couple of things like the right to be forgotten. I personally have opinions. I am not a fan of the right to be forgotten because that's not actually the way the world works. And it seems that the new management at Arduino is attempting to take that same stance. And then there's, there's a second part of this that people really might look at and be really, really worried about. There's a clause that says that users are not allowed to reverse engineer or attempt to understand how the platform works. Okay, now what is the place? Here's the question. If you read this, here's the question that you have to ask yourself, particularly if you actually click through and look at this. Because in the terms of service, that word platform is capitalized how the platform works. Well, in legalese, when you see a word capitalized like that, that means it is a special word that has been specifically, it has been specifically defined somewhere else in the document. All right, so if you actually go back to the beginning of the document and you ask yourself, what is this platform? Well, it will tell you. It is the Arduino Forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User group, the Arduino. It is their web platform. It's not talking about the platforms of the, you know, the individual pieces of hardware. It is their online services. And so the terms of service says you don't get to reverse engineer the Arduino online platform. And duh, I think that's already illegal in a lot of places. But it's also just bog standard terms of service with the publishing and the ownership rights. So here are two, here are two things to think about with that. And it comes down to licensing, open source licensing. The first thing to think about is this, at least in the United States, when you write something and you don't put a license on it, do you know what the copyright terms are? By default, all rights reserved. By default you get copyright on it. And so if someone does not put a license on it, technically, then Arduino is not going to have the rights to reproduce it. And so there has to be some sort of copyright grant. There has to be some sort of licensing that by default will allow someone to, that will allow Arduino to even publish these things that people give them to publish. The one thing in reading through this, I've took a little bit more time in reading through this one question that I have. One thing that it seems to do is if you publish something under the GPL this seems to remove some of the restrictions that the GPL would put on it. It would make that more permissive than the GPL would because it gives Arduino the rights to use it. Aside from. So essentially it's dual licensing is essentially what's happening. If some user uploads code, it's under the gpl. You upload it to Arduino, you then give them this separate license, dual license code.
