On Fri, 12 Nov 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'm sorry to have to be objective, but Scott is right. There is a (miniscule)
> potential liability, and given the 'deep pockets' mentality of lawyers
> (starting to understand why I don't want to practice?) he's right: a shark
> (read parasitical unproductive shyster) would see MC as a target.
Unfortunately we've had to embrace Grove's law when it comes to
lawyers: Only the paranoid survive ;-)
> Personally I would appreciate _any help from Scott or MC and would be willing
> to draft whatever would be useful to help this project. On that point your
> 'lite' license appears to be the same as your 'heavy' license. If you wish I
> can draw up a license for the 'lite' version that would limit its use.
No, I think that's the point. The free Starter Kit can be used to
produce commercial applications just like the regular license. The
only difference is that there is a *technical* limitation on setting
scripts in the Starter Kit (10 effective statements) that doesn't
apply with the regular license (even the 64K limit has been removed
for the 2.3 release). And the only thing you can't distribute if you
get the regular license is the licensed Home stack or the license key
(both of which have your name in it, to help discourage you from doing
this ;-)
> Also
> the 'splash dialogue' could be (slightly) improved. Helvetica doesn't bother
> me, and the dialogue's are ok. I shall start on standard icons of 16x16,
> 32x3é, and 64x64 using a macintosh and storing them both as resources and as
> bitmaps (pict format).
Anyone can start on the UI at any time. Pretty much all the cosmetic
stuff can be done with just the Starter Kit. It's just wiring it
together and creating advanced features that you'd need to write
longer scripts for.
And from another message:
> Anthony: Or would it be Scott's decision?
>
> Alain: While Scott is quite open to just about
> anything that is reasonable (non-restrictive), I
> imagine that he might want to have a say in this
> matter. This doesn't resolve the objective versus
> subjective issue, however. (e.g. who will set the
> criteria to evaluate a candidate's merit?)
While I'm sure this is one of the areas I'd like to kibbitz in, I
think the basic plan is that since you all are going to all the
trouble to establish an organization and defining license terms, we
can trust you not to "soil your own nest" as it were by letting people
become partners in the organization who are more trouble than they're
worth. And if they're of value to the organization, they should have
a MetaCard license to work with in case they want to develop or debug
the UI.
And from yet another message:
> Alain: Unless we make our licence GPL-like for
> OpenKard and its derivatives.
>
> Alain: Although I have written about this often and
> recently, it bears recalling once more that I do NOT
> consider software created with the OpenKard authoring
> system to be derivative works, and thus would NOT be
> have to be open source (e.g. commercial interest ). If
> it were otherwise, all documents typed with MicroSoft
> Word would be the intellectual property of MicroSoft
> (for example).
*You* might think this, but I think you might be the only one.
Certainly anyone with a technical appreciation for the subject
wouldn't make this mistake. For example, your comparison with Word is
bogus: there could be no restriction on distributing stacks by
themselves, but distributing stacks that anyone could *use* would
require distributing executable code, and that code would fall under
GPL. By your analogy it would be perfectly OK to distribute a copy of
Word with your document just in case the recipient couldn't view it
with whatever software they happened to already have installed.
I did think of one way you could be right, though, and that would be
if OC wrote out MetaCard stacks, in which case people could distribute
their application with the MetaCard Starter Kit (which, unbelievable as
it sounds, has fewer restrictions on distribution than any GPL
software does). But this doesn't sound like such a good idea to me.
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
