Peter Tribble wrote:
> 2) The removal of the open source requirement.
>
> That's a thornier one. The OGB owns no copyright in the code and can therefore
> make no pronouncements as to licensing. The fact remains that we should be
> an open source community and many people have joined the community on that
> basis. Strengthening of the purpose from the charter might make it easier.
But it's a requirement that OpenSolaris has never fully met - you still can't
build a fully open source distro of OpenSolaris, and declaring that everything
we've shipped isn't really a product of the OpenSolaris community until the
Emanicipation Project is completed doesn't make sense.
Perhaps the compromise position would be to replace the current text of:
All software produced by the OpenSolaris Community shall be licensed
to the public free of charge under one or more open source licenses
approved by the Open Source Initiative.
With:
All software produced by the OpenSolaris Community shall be licensed
to the public free of charge under one or more licenses approved by
the OpenSolaris Governing Board.
(i.e. delete "open source" and change OSI to OGB for approval).
And then leave specifics to an OGB policy, which would state something like:
1) All new contributions to OpenSolaris projects should be made under a
license that allows for free use, modification, and redistribution.
In cases where encumbrances prevent distribution of sources and/or
modified versions, exceptions to this may be made by review of the
appropriate project or community group, as long as the binaries
remain under an acceptable license that allows free use & redistribution.
2) All OpenSolaris projects and consolidations should declare their preferred
license or licenses for original contributions, and whether such original
contributions require sharing rights ownership with the OGB's designated
IP rights steward (currently Sun Microsystems, Inc. under the terms of the
Sun Contributor Agreement).
3) All licenses covering works distributed by OpenSolaris community groups
and projects must be approved by the OpenSolaris Governing Board.
The initial set of approved licenses are:
- All licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative as compliant
with the Open Source Definition, as listed at:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses
- The OpenSolaris Binary License, as listed at:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing/opensolaris_binary_license/
- For works other than computer software, such as documentation, these
Creative Commons licenses:
Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
as listed at:
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses are explicitly not allowed.
No Derivatives licenses are strongly discouraged, but allowed when the
project or community believes the intended usage does not require
rights to modify by the project or distribution builders.
The OGB discourages license proliferation and encourages communities and
projects to choose one of the existing licenses already in widespread use
in OpenSolaris whenever possible, such as CDDL, GPL, LGPL, BSD, or MIT.
Projects targeting integration into a consolidation are expected to follow
the license preferences of the community or project managing that
consolidation.
This pretty much matches existing practice, just adding the formalism of having
communities/projects approve license choices and the OGB approve acceptable
licenses that aren't already on the list. But I also worry that adds another
layer of integration work required beyond OSR review for incoming code and
will lead to conflicts if management has different licensing ideas at some
point, so you'd definitely need to get management buy-in to honor such a policy
first.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
