This is the most advisable path for writing a new free license: - DON'T. Actually, I don't. Really really don't. We have enough license proliferation already.
If you decide that there is an absolute need for a new free license, which outweighs the cost (which is unlikely), then: - Make sure you have a good understanding of copyright and patent law, and that which you are trying to achieve is legally possible, and that you fully understand what the side effects are. - Make sure you have read and understood, in full (not summaries), all existing free licenses (well, at least the known ones). - Make sure you fully understand what "free software" means to adjacent communities (the GNU/FSF and Debian, the latter being a bit stricter). Also make sure you fully understand what "open source" means (to OSI and to Debian, which uses the two terms as synonyms): this is to avoid splitting the free software community, since disagreements about what licenses are "FLOSS" currently only lie on the very boundary of software freedom, and belong to licenses which are rarely used. - Make sure that you truly know what you are trying to achieve would be uncontroversially considered "free" and that there is no existing free license that can achieve that already. - Wonder whether the thing you are trying to achieve is one we need at all. - Write the license **with legal council**. Don't assume you can write a good license without the help from lawyers: you probably can't even if you are a lawyer yourself. - Consult with the community, get feedback and truly learn from it, then repeat until you have a stable text. Make sure that the literal text of the license, its intention and how a developer and a court of law are likely to parse it align. Anything else would lead to a license which is useless. > We( me and other developers involved) are using the term Free Acces > Technology to refer to works released under this license. That's a very weird definition. It's very weird to define a class of *things* by the fact that they are all released under one specific license. There is a misconception (which I don't know where it comes from) that free software is software under the GPL. This is false: free software can be released under any free software licenses, the GPL is just one of them. The vast majority of free software licenses are non-copyleft, too. I'm not saying you have this misconception, to be clear. But why would you define "Free Acces Technology" not based on abstract ideas and principles, but rather based on one very specific license? _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
