Hello,
I have enjoyed following this very interesting thread about copyrights, permission to use, etc., and here is my two cents worth.
I give these comments with the standard disclaimer that "I am not an attorney and this is just informative conversation, not legal advice."
My understanding of the usual arrangement when a person gives usage permission for an intellectual work to another person (or company), is that the publisher gains the right to publish the work, and unless otherwise specified, the author retains the right to re-publish his or her own work elsewhere. This is called giving permission for "non-exclusive use."
For instance, I've had a few articles published in trade magazines. The magazines and all their contents were covered under the publishers' copyright notices. However, since I didn't sign away my re-publication rights, I was still able to re-publish or modify my own original work.
The applicability to Hal, I think, is that most of us have no problem allowing the scripts we've written to be incorporated into Hal, and copied and modified by other users for use in Hal. What most of us would OBJECT to would be something like the following:
1. Another user makes a modification to our own work, and then proclaims an all-consuming prohibition against anybody else writing anything similar, including our own original work!
2. Our work gets incorporated into Ultra Hal, and then some giant corporation buys Zabaware, and threatens to sue us all if we make any chatterbots containing even one line of our own original code!
I have actually seen websites with chatterbots whose authors claimed to have "invented the chatterbot concept", and threatened everybody with legal retaliation if they supposedly "infringed" on the CONCEPT of a chatterbot. I think such threats are absolutely preposterous, but such threats do get made.
Anyway, in my opinion, the following permission is the one that I think describes the common-sense approach:
"Zabaware, Inc., and all legitimate users of Zabaware software are hereby given free, non-exclusive permission to use and incorporate the work contributed by (insert name), in conjunction with the operation and use of Zabaware software. The author retains the right of re-publication or modification of his or her own original work."
Respectfully yours,
Don Ferguson
Ultra-Hal Fan and Contributor