On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Alain Farmer wrote:
> CLIP: What are other people's thoughts on this issue? Has anyone
> proposed a specific licencing agreement for openCard to adopt yet?
> Anyone with any ideas on how to protect MetaCard's interests while
> still benefitting the UFP as much as possible?
>
> Alain : Yes, I asked these questions. Answers anyone ?
This really should be your first step. There is a continuum of
choices here, any of which would be acceptable to us as part of the
process of granting a MetaCard license to UFP/OpenCard members:
Most restrictive is the GNU "copyleft" which requires source code to
be distributed with all derivative products.
Next down is something like Apple's Darwin license and the Mozilla
license which requires that the source code to derivative products
be turned back over to the copyright holder (but not necessarily
released publicly).
Next down is the BSD-type license which requires only that a
copyright notice be included in all derivative products.
Next down is the Perl "Artistic" license which doesn't require any
notices so long as you change the file names so that there is no
possibility of confusion with a standard Perl distribution and
include a pointer to the original package in your documentation.
Finally there is true public domain, where there are no restrictions
whatsoever.
One of the latter two would probably be the easiest to implement. The
Mozilla and BSD licenses require an original copyright holder, which
doesn't exist in this case. The Perl license is kind of long, but
could be used without modification (see
http://language.perl.com/misc/Artistic.html). True PD distribution
just requires a one line statement of that fact someplace in the
package.
I would also recommend you appoint a "leader" to coordinate this (and
any other) decision making process. Anarchy is fine for some things,
but the key characteristic of all successful Open Source projects that
I know of is that there is one person ultimately responsible for
making decisions. Without that, you'll end up with just a lot of talk
and not much to show for it (which is about exactly what you've got so
far). I open the floor to nominations...
Regards,
Scott
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********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
