On 8/22/05, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sunday 21 August 2005 20:48, Timothy Miller wrote: > > > > While we had concerns of copyright, no patents apply, so we had no > > need to change any of the ideas. Therefore, you will see significant > > similarities between the new model and the old model. However, there > > is no genetic relationship between the old and new models. (If > > someone wants to try to verify that, please feel free to do so.) > > Actually, I think the opposite is much more interesting. Knowing that no code > was copied between both sets of code, how similar are they? If in the future > someone dares to accuse Linux of containing copied code, it would have to be > substantially more similar to the alleged origin than this. Anyway, I suppose > that's a discussion for another mailing list.
If someone around knows about some comparator program they can run, they should try it. > > > Below is a draft of the license I would like to apply to the model. > > Critique it. As soon as that is settled, I'll check the new model > > into SVN. > > > > // Open Graphics 3D renderer model, Mark 2 > > // Copyright 2005, Traversal Technology > > // Written by Andy Fong > > > > > > // This source code is licensed as follows: > > // (1) By default, the sole copyright owner is Traversal Technology, under > > a // proprietary license. Traversal may make proprietary use of this > > work // and any derivative works. > > I'm fine with the intent, but the wording doesn't make sense. You can't be a > copyright owner under a certain licence. IANAL, but I'd replace the first > sentence with something like > > Traversal Technology is the sole copyright owner of the Work, and retains all > rights granted by copyright law. In particular, Traversal Technology reserves > the right to publish the Work and/or derivative Works under any license it > sees fit, including proprietary licenses. That's good. > > > // (2) By default, any changes submitted by community members fall under > > this // same license. Traversal Technology will openly publish all > > internally // and externally-provided modifications to this work under > > this same // license. Traversal Technology may opt to not publish IP > > that may // or may not be considered a derivative work (ie. a chip). > > Wouldn't a modified version be a derivative work? Where is the borderline > between a modification and a derivative work? I don't think there is a borderline, although many people would probably think of there being a fuzzy one. Let's just go with worst case and think of a modification something that makes a derivative work. This makes things safer. I also don't want to play about willy-nilly with people's rights. Think of it this way: If you advise me on a bug fix, and I make the fix, well, I developed the IP, so I own it. You can't own an idea like that (unless you patent it). But nevertheless, it may have taken you a lot of work to come up with that advice. I want it to be right out there out in the open what the situation is, and I don't want anyone to feel that I'm taking advantage of them. > If we can't find a better way > of wording this, at least (for your protection) it should be clear that > Traversal Technology is the one who determines whether a work is a > modification or not. Perhaps we can simply say that any derived works that > are in the form of software will be published, while derived works that are > in the form of hardware descriptions may not be? Well, I think of the model as an embodyment of a set of ideas. While I don't want to take any risks, someone with a lot more money might be able to get a judge to rule that their Verilog code is NOT a derivative work. Rather than trying to control what other people can and cannot do, I'm going to just let the Free bits hang out there under the GPL and let people do what they want under those terms. But I think it's not unreasonable to let the founders have a necessary competitive advantage over other vendors, and that comes down to letting my company use the same code and derivative works under a non-GPL license as well. What I want to stay away from is (a) trying to modify the terms of the GPL, and (b) developing something that is a derivative of a GPL work when it would be fatal to publish that derivative work. That's why I want the primary license to be proprietary. I feel like I'm going around in circles. I think people get what I'm trying to do. I just need to be clear about it. > > > // (3) At any time, members of the open source community, at their > > choosing, // are authorized to convert an instance of this work to the > > GPL license. // Under such circumstances, this license change must be > > explicitly // indicated in the GPL fork so that clause (2) is not > > invoked. > > Hmm. But then why not publish under the GPL right away, and require submitters > to either sign over their copyright to Traversal Technologies, or to publish > their code under the MIT/X/modified BSD licence, so that you can keep the > right to make proprietary derivatives? Those are all fine and accomplish my goal. I don't need them to sign copyright. All I need is permission to use their work under proprietary (as well as GPL) terms. I don't care what their licensing terms are, as long as I can use it the way we need to. Am I confusing the issue? Anyone know what TrollTech and MySQL do to insulate themselves against patch-subitters making claims? How about something like this: DUAL LICENSING (1) This Work is licensed under GPL 2.0. You may use this Work under those terms as you see fit. (2) This Work is also licensed as a proprietary work, all rights belonging to Traversal Technology. Traversal Technology may use this Work under those terms and has the right to publish, license, and sell this Work and derivative works as they see fit. These rights are granted to Traversal Technology as long as this clause is included the Work. (3) Patches, modifications, and extensions to this Work that are submitted to the Open Graphics Project, the Open Graphics Mailing List, directly to Traversal Technology, or in any way to an officially recognized repository for or representative of the preceeding shall, by default, fall under BOTH sets of licensing terms. So, basically, if someone want to remove the Traversal license, all they have to do is delete (2) and (3) from every source file. Should I state that explicitly? Do I need to make any statement to prevent someone from removing those clauses from any official repository, or would an act like that be considered vandalism? If someone wants to get rid of Traversal's rights, all they have to do is download it, modify it, and then publish it on their OWN server. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
