I have gotten a series of questions/replies similar to the following, which I selected for no other reason than it was the most recent one and it was addressed to the entire group. (By the way, I do thank those who have responded, many of the replies have had points that were worthy of consideration.)
> So when someone's editing a file each time they write out the file > they have to send the result to other people? No, that's not the intent. Such a requirement would be onerous and pointless. That is one of details, that is still being resolved, and there are lots of little subtleties that need to be straightened out. We don't want to require "every trivial" change to cause a requirement for publishing. In fact, we don't want to force preemptive publishing at all, just a requirement that if a derivative version exists, that other people who wish to have access to that version have a way of getting the source code. The idea we are trying to prevent is "secret versions", versions where someone modifies the software in a proprietary way and uses that software for "unfair" advantage. The following example should be illustrative. Cadence Design took a copy of Emacs and modified it to have hooks into their propietary design tool, Verilog-XL. That is a derivative work of Emacs. However, they chose not to distribute the modified verion to avoid having to release "trade secrets". Because some of the GPL restictions apply only at the redistribution level, Cadence was able to leverage Emacs into an internal tool that gave them a competitive advantage. The goal of the license I was proposing was to disallow that as a vaild use of the copylefted sources. That is, once they created such a derivative work, other users would have the right to it also. In particular, the folks at Synopsys, one of Cadence's competitors, should have the right to view the modified source code in case it helps them come up with a better version of their own tools. In contrast, many users of emacs create a startup file that turns on various modes, the intent of the license is not to require each of them to put their version of emacs up on a publicly addressable web page and post notice that such a version exists by taking out a full page advertisement in the NY Times. However, if you customize your version of Emacs, and someone asks you, "How did you do that?", you, as a derivative author, should be required to point them at a copy of the code for your customization which they can learn from. Hopefully, the above two examples also explain how we intend to enforce this particular feature of the license--by competitor pressure. If one makes a derivative version of the software under the license, and a competitor finds out, the competitor will have the right to require that a copy of the software be made available to them as open source (i.e. under the terms of the license), and if the derivative author refuses, the derivative author will not have rights to the derivative copy as they will be violating the terms of the license which allowed them to make that derivative copy. And here is one of the subtle points, perhaps we can only enforce that restriction as an author. That is to conform to the requirements of copyright law, we might have to state that the author has the right to request a copy of any derivative work be provided back under the terms of the original license. Then, if the competitor wanted to enforce the clause, they would have to request the support of the original author, and to have the author make the request to the infringing derivative author. However, since there is no such license submitted for approval that attempts to implement such a restriction, if y'all want to ignore the subtleties of how one might write such a license, that is fine by me. I'm sure most of you have more important things to do. Again, my thanks for your time. -Chris -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
