License and Right eXchange // knowledge base
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The cathedral of code sharing rests on legal foundations: permissive grants, copyleft obligations, attribution requirements. Each license is a social contract encoded in legalese.
When one party grants and another receives, the exchange is never symmetric. Rights flow like current through a circuit -- resistance, capacitance, and occasional short circuits define the path.
The viral clause: derivative works inherit the license of their parent. A recursive legal structure that ensures freedom propagates, forcing openness through legal obligation rather than moral appeal.
Credit flows upstream. Every fork remembers its origin. The attribution requirement creates an invisible genealogy connecting every derivative work to every ancestor.
Modern licenses include explicit patent provisions. The right to use extends beyond copyright into the minefield of patent claims -- a defensive shield built into legal text.
Not all freedoms are compatible. Combining GPL and Apache, mixing MIT and AGPL -- the compatibility matrix is a logical puzzle that determines what can coexist.
One codebase, two legal realities. The open path and the commercial path diverge from the same source, creating parallel universes of rights and obligations.
Where license ends and fair use begins remains contested terrain. Transformative use, educational exemption, parody defense -- each carves exceptions into the absolute language of rights.
Copyright crosses borders differently than code crosses networks. Berne Convention, TRIPS, WIPO treaties -- the legal infrastructure that makes global licensing possible and complicated.
The technological enforcement layer. DRM transforms legal rights into technical constraints, making the license not just a document but a mechanism embedded in the medium itself.
The entire apparatus of licensing exists because humans decided that ideas can be owned. This is neither natural law nor inevitable -- it is a collective fiction maintained by consensus and enforced by institutions. The wiki documents this fiction with the same care that a naturalist documents a species: cataloguing its behaviors, mapping its habitats, noting its predators and prey. Every license is an ecosystem. Every right is a territory. Every exchange is an encounter between organisms that have evolved different strategies for survival in the same legal biome. The question is never whether licensing will become simpler. The question is whether the complexity serves the creators or merely the intermediaries. The wiki takes no position. The wiki observes. The wiki records. The wiki is the territory and the map simultaneously.
Every license interpreted, every right exchanged, every boundary tested and every precedent set -- archived in the lattice of collective knowledge. The data persists. The wiki endures.
END OF WIKI // lrx.wiki