On Sun, 2 May 1999, Alain Farmer wrote:
> Uli : BTW, I'm also in favor of a limited MetaCard license. That is,
> the version of MC that the UFP gets for this project shouldn't be
> applicable for commercial projects.
I'm not sure we have any really strong need to do this. Certainly it
would be a lot more work for us to impose this restriction.
> Alain : Let's be clear that we are talking about the MetaCard-Engin
> only, eh.
>
> Alain : It's a shame that projects created with OpenCard and the
> MC-engin will not be distributable because of the licencing
> restrictions on the engin. I wonder if MetaCard would consider some
> favorable licencing terms for this eventuality, or a licence-free
> runtime MC-engin, or something.
Correction here: There *are* no run-time licensing requirements for
the MetaCard engines. The only restriction on stacks you distribute
is that they can't *set* scripts that have more effective statements
than allowed by the Starter Kit (currently 10 lines, but that is
subject to change). So you could distribute an OpenCard UI on the
MetaCard engine and it would actually be possible to build real stuff
with it (though building anything other than small stuff gets pretty
messy because you have to split scripts up among a lot of objects).
> Uli : It should also display a message somewhere (maybe at the bottom
> of each window) that mentions that this is only for UFP use so there is
> no chance of this MetaCard license tourism.
This would only be useful if it did this for runtimes as well as
during development. And as said above, making it do this would be
more work for us.
> Alain : Here's a controversial proposition for solving the MC-engin
> licencing issue. Install a web robot in the MC-engin that acts like a
> homing-pigeon e.g. the robot would notify MetaCard of licence
> violations thru the WWW.
We've considered this too as part of our normal licensing policy.
Unfortunately, too many people are not networked (or not networked
from the machine they use for MetaCard development) to make this
practical. Maybe in 5 or 10 years...
I'm still in favor of some social control here rather than trying some
new technical approach. As I suggested to Alain sometime ago, one way
to do this would be to require that some fraction of the OpenCard
group membership (say 25% or 50%) approve you before you get your
MetaCard license. This would encourage participation (so that people
know who you are and so would vote for you) and to some extent
distribute the responsibility for approval to enough people that any
posers would get weeded out before they get a license and any abusers
would likely be discovered by at least one of the people who approved
them. While this kind of oligarchy failed miserably in the case of
the Soviet Union, it might be just the ticket here ;-)
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...
