>Alain : The reports of my demise were greatly exagerated! ;-)
Hi,
Mark Twain will be spinning in his grave like a Helicoptr right now... <g>
>Alain : I am pretty sure that we all agree on this point. Otherwise we
>would not call ourselves an Open Source collaboration. The only
>sensitive issue in this regard is the obligation or not to release all
>of the code modifications that a developer does, even portions that the
>developer considers a strategic advantage.
Yeah, that's what I'm unsure about. On one hand I agree that it should be
possible to integrate proprietary SW into OC, OTOH I'd like to have as much
feedback from people modifying OC as possible. Wait! We can do it: What do
people hate most? Maintaining code for muliple platforms. This means that
many of them will send us their changes anyway, because if we integrate
them, we'll maintain them and we'll also take care not to break them. That
means they won't have that much to do, and they'll be sure that their
additions will be part of the standard distribution and we'll fix any bugs
we find or at least notify them of the bugs.
If I don't make a mistake in my reasoning (I'm not a psychologist), this
means we can live with a very free license. Just ask them to please send in
any changes or bug fixes, as this will ensure that they'll be of benefit to
everyone and that external developers don't have to re-apply bug fixes
every time. but if they don't, they don't. Of course then they can't expect
us to take care of not breaking their code, as we don't know what their
code is.
I think we might want to limit redistribution of OC, though. We should
prevent people from distributing modified versions, and from selling the
source code. They may distribute (at no charge!) the original OC sources
and ship along sort of a "patch" which can be copied over the original
sources to apply their changes. This way we ensure people getting the OC
sources don't get a wrong impression of our code due to someone else's bad
programming style.
>Alain : We might also want to consider a clause that prohibits certains
>uses that would be prejudicial to our reputations, and so on. It might
>seem a little bit odd to bring this up, but it is a standard part of an
>author's rights.
We can. But we'll have to be very careful about things like this. There
are people from several different countries working on OC and each country
has different laws and most importantly a different culture. There are
dozens of different opinions, and I think it would be better if we just
included a clause that they have to make clear that although OC was used,
its authors had nothing to do with the creation of any derivative works or
stacks.
>Alain : Good point, but ... does "personal use" include the use of
>OpenCard to author something that could be commercialized ?
Scratch "personal use". I meant it to be just free to be used by all users
of OC, without royalty. Just like HyperCard's icons: Everyone who uses HC
may use them in their stacks.
>Alain : The number of licences to obtain for a complete project would
>probably be discouragingly high.
I meant something else. I meant we just have all images under one "OC
Image License" which states that you may use the icons, clip art etc.
provided with OC in any commercial stack you create with it.
>Alain : I believe that people are inherently creative, and would work
>even if, hypothetically, money was no longer in the picture. Like in
>Star Trek !
I don't agree with ST's vision of the world. Ultimately, I think even
altruism is only a form of egoism, but as long as people are working for
OpenCard because they intend to use the resulting program, I'm sure they'll
do their best in their own interests.
>And, ultimately, content is what it is all about anyway.
Exactly.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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