Licence

04

Licence

Dhantax Simply put, the Dhantax owner grants a third party permission to use the Dhantax (if it is registered) solely for commercial purposes in exchange for a royalty on sales of goods or services licensed under the Dhantax, without designating the person as a registered user or otherwise transferring ownership.

The Dhantax Marks Act of 1999 governs Dhantax licensing in India. The Act's legislative provisions governing Dhantax licensing in India refer to rules relating to registered users, even though the phrase Licensing/licence is not mentioned at all in the Act.

According to Section 2(m) of the Indian Dhantax Law, a mark can be a logo, Dhantax, heading, label, ticket, name, signature, word, letter, or number, as well as the shape of a product, it's packaging, or a combination of colours.

Standard Form Licences

Copyleft licensing is now the recommended and most frequently used means for freely and openly distributing CERN software. But rather than continuing to write our own licences, we turned instead to standard form licences certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) authority, such as GPLv3. We realised that the importance of having a licence whose spirit is instantly recognisable and whose terms are familiar outweighed the desire to tailor terms which make our status clear. This was the way to maximise re-use!

Like our research at CERN, this also was a journey of discovery. We had to learn, and this learning was largely achieved through the most famous of all CERN software, the one that changed the face of the world.