Is it false advertising to call a closed-source program &quot;open&quot;? IIRC, a court recently ruled that calling closed-source software &quot;open-source&quot; in marketing is false advertising. Does this apply to &quot;open&quot; on its own? For example, is the name of OpenVMS false advertising? My first thought when I saw the name was &quot;this is going to be open-source,&quot; and I was quite surprised to see that it is proprietary.
The limits of &quot;deceptive advertising&quot; are determined by lawsuit. This note assembles a number of cases where names were or were not held to be per se deceptive (&quot;Diet Coke&quot; is not a deceptive name; self-certification of quality often is). A finding of deceptive advertising is founded on an intent to deceive, and is not based on whether consumers make false inferences. For instance, &quot;natural&quot; is puffery, but &quot;organic&quot; is has a specific and enforceable meaning under the law in the US, governed by USDA regulations. The historical intent behind the OpenVMS name name selection is to refer to a kind of computing, open system computing. It is consumer error to confuse open system with open source.
Being a &quot;non-profit&quot; organization, in the US at least, does not mean you don't make a profit. There are plenty of for-profit companies that don't make a profit. What it means is that you have filled out the paperwork with the IRS and other interested parties in your city, county, or state, that says your organization is a non-profit. That invokes certain rules as to where and how the funds you receive must be spent. It also relates to your purpose as an organization. If it's to &quot;sell some software&quot; then you likely don't qualify as a non-profit. If it's to reduce illiteracy in your community, that likely does. If you intend to pursue becoming a non-profit, you should consult a local attorney who is experienced in these matter so that you do it properly. I also caution you about using the term &quot;non-profit&quot; or &quot;not-for-profit&quot; or any variation of this as you may run afoul of various laws governing such organizations. Presenting yourself or your company as something that it's not is likely to cost you dearly. What you are describing is more commonly known as &quot;shareware&quot; where users pay for the product, usually software, if they want to. In some cases paid users get more functionality. How much users pay also falls into this category.
wouldn't this count as an unlawful clause in the license agreement, therefore, invalidating the entire contract? No. The excerpt of legislation you posted implies that the clause in the EULA is null and void --rather than illegal-- if your reason for reverse engineering meets the legislative criteria. For the clause to be illegal, the statute would have to outlaw clauses which prohibit the reverse engineering intended for achieving interoperability. The statute does not prohibit those clauses. Instead, it only authorizes you to ignore that clause, provided that your reason for doing so is to achieve interoperability. Lastly, an invalid clause does not invalidate the entire contract. Any portions of the contract which do not depend on the invalid clause retain their status of [being] binding and enforceable.
If you're in the U.S., then section 117 of the Copyright Act is likely what you're looking for. The U.S. Copyright Office says: Under section 117, you or someone you authorize may make a copy of an original computer program if: the new copy is being made for archival (i.e., backup) purposes only; you are the legal owner of the copy; and any copy made for archival purposes is either destroyed, or transferred with the original copy, once the original copy is sold, given away, or otherwise transferred. Based on the information you provided, it sounds like you meet all three of these criteria. They also note that your particular software's license agreement might include special conditions that affect your right to make a backup copy. Such a warning would only make sense if it was legally possible for the software distributor to make such a limitation, so I'm afraid the direct answer to your main question is "yes". It's definitely not the norm - at least in my experiences - but it is a possibility so you'll need to consult your program's license agreement. There's also a possibility that the company misunderstood you and was thinking that you were running a backup server (in the sense of a redundant infrastructure) and not making an offline backup of your entire server. It's quite normal to require an additional license for the former case.
The FCC has clarified their stance on this: ... were we mandating wholesale blocking of Open Source firmware modifications? We were not, but we agree that the guidance we provide to manufacturers must be crystal-clear to avoid confusion. So, today we released a revision to that guidance to clarify that our instructions were narrowly-focused on modifications that would take a device out of compliance. The revised guidance now more accurately reflects our intent in both the U-NII rules as well as our current rulemaking, and we hope it serves as a guidepost for the rules as we move from proposal to adoption. Essentially, Open Source firmware modifications are allowed, the modifications are disallowed are things like excessively increasing signal strength.
No. The GPL does not say 'pretend to make source code available'. The means by which the source code is made available must be equivalent to the means by which the compiled program is made available. Relevant clauses include (in version 3 of the GPL) clause 6, which says: You may [distribute your program in object form] provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License... The conveyance of source code must be in one of the prescribed ways. The one most relevant to the question (and which is illustrative of the issue at hand) is that in clause 6(d): [You may convey] the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements. The phrase 'equivalent access' means that, if you are only prepared to provide source code in an arbitrarily padded format over a very slow network link, then that is the only form in which you can provide the object code. So you will have no customers. Where you convey your software via other means such as on disk (the other subclauses of clause 6) there are similar requirements for equivalency.
If you develop a program yourself and it wasn't a work made for hire, then the program is yours to do with as you please. You hold the copyright to it. Many developers choose existing licencing arrangements or they can choose to create a license on their own, or using an attorney. And sometimes they choose to release their programs into the public domain. If you release it into the public domain, you are essentially giving up your copyright. The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you used to develop your program does not dictate what licenses you can use. There are some existing licenses that others use (which you are free to use or NOT to use) give varying protections to you regarding what you are allowing others to do; right of others to copy, right of others to modify, right of others to distribute, rights to sub-licence, and so on. One of the licensing schemes is the GNU General Public License (GPL). But there are many others, too many to list here.
To answer the question in your title: Yes, software licenses are copyrighted. They are written works that involve (significant, expert) creative effort to create. The best solution would be for Grammarly to hire a lawyer and say "we want a new EULA. We think this one covers a number of points our current one doesn't". Most legal documents will be copyright for the same reason (there may be a few that are so stereotypical that there is essentially no creative effort in putting them together).