Who owns what?

[richmond62]

Screen Shot 2023-10-06 at 8.01.15.png (95.11 KiB) Viewed 1951 times

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https://livecode.com/
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Perhaps, FourthWorld, as you seem to know far more about this sort of thing than . . .

[FourthWorld]

My opinion matters little. What does the license say?

[richmond62]

If "the language formerly known as Transcript" BELONGS to LiveCode we should all pack up now and go home.

[tperry2x]

Or does it belong to Revolution, Metacard, or Supercard, or perhaps even to Apple with their Hypercard roots?

I think trademarking the language is probably a moot point, no more than you can trademark C+
Yes, it might be that we have to mention in the credits somewhere who the underlying language was sourced from, but it'd be like trademarking the 'concept' of a car.
Instead, there are plenty of companies having a go at making cars, but their unique IP isn't the car or the idea of the car - it's the implementation.

So by extension, Livecode / Revolution / Metacard / Supercard / Apple -et-all don't "own" the language - just their particular implementation of it.

Equally, for it to have been an open-source project, that implies that all claims of ownership are null and void does it not?

From wikipedia: "...[livecode] features the LiveCode Script (formerly MetaTalk) programming language which belongs to the family of xTalk scripting languages like HyperCard's HyperTalk"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

As it was formerly MetaTalk, (part of the xTalk family), and itself based on HyperTalk - I don't think anyone can claim to technically own it? If they wanted to try and claim it belonged to them, I think Apple could rightly push back and say that they never gave Livecode permission to use the language in the first place.

If anything, I'd say for LC to claim that "it's our programming language" is a misnomer as it does not "belong" to them, it is derived from other works and has additions they have added.

The same reason we can't start hacking around with LC 10 (or whatever version is their latest) because it would still be 'Based' upon Livecode but we wouldn't own it to start adapting it to our own needs in the first place.

[richmond62]

I agree with you, and was playing devil's advocate.

I do think LiveCode, by stating "our language" are out of order.

This is like the English stating that English (the language) is somehow theirs, and they have a right to object to what they, snottily, term 'Americanisms', 'Scotticisms', and so on. When English stopped being exclusively theirs at least 500 year syne.

But, just as we Scots, Americans, Canadians, and so on, must tak tent of English hubris, and shouldna be cowed by it, forbye: we need to keep a beady eye on LC central and make sure they do not overstep the mark, picturing themselves as the keepers of the true faith.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Or does it belong to Revolution, Metacard, or Supercard, or perhaps even to Apple with their Hypercard roots?

You missed a handful of others.

It's definitely not THIER language, the Script is almost entirely derived from other xTalks that came before or existed concurrently with MetaCard. I think MetaTalk, Transcript or whatever it was called was modeled on SuperCard's SuperTalk more so than HyperTalk.

Other things like adding xTalk Array syntax, I'm pretty sure was in Oracle MediaObjects and others (perhaps implemented differently) added that in the late 80s / early 1990s, and there was at least one XFCN/XCMD that added Arrays capabilities to HyperCard. There's lots and lots of syntax in OUR xTalk language that has Synonym(s), or at least non-functional stub syntax for script-level compatibility with other xTalks (obviously courting users to jump ship). One clear example of this is the fact that you can use the generic 'Exit to Top' OR... 'exit to metacard', 'exit to supercard', or 'exit to hypercard' and the Engine will gladly exit whatever scripts are executing all the same.

[FourthWorld]

If "the language formerly known as Transcript" BELONGS to LiveCode we should all pack up now and go home.

"If".

Probably worth reading the license.

[FourthWorld]

Or does it belong to Revolution, Metacard, or Supercard, or perhaps even to Apple with their Hypercard roots?

For many years we were one Supreme Court decision away from having Apple in a position to assert copyright protection against all xTalk dialects.

To this day Oracle's assertion remains untested. The deciding case was ruled against them only because of specifics in that particular case; SCOTUS sidestepped the core argument altogether, leaving it as undecided law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_ ... erica,_Inc.

Equally, for it to have been an open-source project, that implies that all claims of ownership are null and void does it not?

On the contrary. Only an explicit declaration of Public Domain accomplishes that, and only with regard to copyright.

Any other works created in countries which are signatories to the Berne Convention (which is most) establish copyright for the creator from the very moment of creation, even for those works which have no explicit license declaration.

Trademarks and patents are entirely different matters, and may still come into play in cases where copyright may be a settled matter.

With IP, best to avoid assumptions. Anything for which you do not have explicit written permission to use is most safely avoided altogether.

For this reason, a few years ago GitHub started cracking down on repositories without a LICENSE.md file, since the disposition of the code is unknown, and thus legally useless by others.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

If "the language formerly known as Transcript" BELONGS to LiveCode we should all pack up now and go home.

"If".

Probably worth reading the license.

Basically LC were claiming anything written with this script was a derivative work, so subject to the same license (GPLv3), and defined it something like this (IIRC): if you need this particular (set of) engine(s) to make your script do it's work then it is a derivative work...

SOOOOoooo if you force yourself to write your scripts in like a HyperTalk 1.x dialect, which can still be run it in miniVMac emulator (among others), or maybe you avoid GUI stuff and run it with OpenXION in a JVM (on some crazy OS such as helloSystem!) then I guess these xTalk scripts are NOT actually a derivative of anything LC, right?

I really don't need an xTalk to format CLI switches for diving some shell commands (Lua, Python, JS, AppleScript, OpenXION, etc. etc. can all do that), which has been a lot of what I've used it for (making a quick UI for maybe a one-time task). I mostly just prefer the syntactic sugar (yum!) and using things like chunk expressions, which have been part of xTalk(s), whomever 'owns' that (it probably should be Dan Winkler's), since 1987... I'm not sure where I'm goin with that... just that there's a lot of other ways to do what I want to without being tied to this thing, and yet I'm still a fan.

I've read somewhere that Apple had specifically decided NOT to go to court over SuperTalk (followed by others), but to instead encourage the proliferation of xTalks (as they had just started to become known as), and at that point, around the late 80s, there was somewhat of a push to make xTalk into some sort of standardize language. The only other historical evidence that I could find to support this was those documents about an xTalk interchange file format proposal (published by Heizer software IIRC). Shortly after this period Apple spun off HyperCard along with Filemaker to the new subsidiary Claris (moof), and then things got really muddied... It makes me sad to think if xTalk could've become an open standard for HyperMedia scripting back back then, early on, we might be using Stack/Card Browsers for checking lottery numbers instead of mishmash of XHTML,HTML5,JS,CSS2,WASM, etc. etc. web pages.