Equality source

Equality source is a concept that the terms under which the code source is made open by the copyright holder is done in such a way that the licensee obtains the same effective rights as the copyright holder, thus emulating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain. This specifically excludes patents, because copyright law don't apply to patents. Patent holders can only exempt those with whom they have signed a contract, with such contract subject to the legalities of their relevant country.

In terms of copyright law all code is either proprietary copyrighted or public domain. GPL code is proprietary code because only a proprietor or copyright license holder has the power to license his code under an open source license. It seems the some sort of (BSD? or Creative commons? ) is the only license which effectively emulates public domain.

GPL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source means that the terms under which the copyright holders such as Linus Torvalds, FSF and RMS licenses their code don't apply to themselves and their "corporate sponsors", establishing a master(licensor)/slave relationship(licensee).

Equality source must be used as the antonym of open source to designate the differences.

Releasing code or ideas under Public domain is not advisable because it can be more easily patented then if it had been released under some sort of creative commons license by the copyright holder. Always ask yourself whether your rights as licensee emulates the effective rights of the copyright holder. For example the FSF litigates against those not paying them lots of protection-against-litigation money like IBM and Google does. You as non-copyright holder cannot litigate on GPL violations etc.