On 9/9/07, Dennis Hayes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am not a lawyer, but it seem to that if we choose a "commercial"
> licessen or a dual licessens, the board will need to form a legal entitiy
> such as a corpration or a leagal assoceation before they will be able enter
> into any type of agreement.
> Dennis
>
And thats precisely the problem. We can't expect any single contributor to
trust their code to the project as an unincorporated group, anymore than the
group can trust a monolithic corporation for the same ends.
I say LGPL as much as possible. I don't think it "coerces" anyone into
contributing back to the project, it just keeps corporations from stealing
the code and taking credit. A simple copyright notice in the source code
does not point an end-user of a compiled commercial product back in our
direction if *they* want to contribute, or at least have the freedom to
modify the software they have on their own system.
Being a modular, object-oriented project, a 3rd-party corporation seeking to
rewrite parts of our code to fit their needs shouldn't have the right to
shrink-wrap their entire derivative app as their own, because modifications
would be sparse and mostly de-coupled from each other - requiring little
credible work. And any 3rd party seeking to rewrite vast tracts of our code,
would probably be better off writing their own code anyway.
And if a 3rd party corporation wants to acquire less restrictive rights to
specific components, I would welcome them to use the header's in the
repsective source code files to seek out the authors of those files, and
request permission from them. Its complex, but its more legal than SharpOS,
as a legal non-entity, trying to control it all.
But I think that GPL itself, is too restrictive in the amount of "freedom"
it gives. I think the fair ground, in the middle, is LGPL. I also think we
we need to make a point, if we go with LGPL, that we specify which version.
In every source code file, and every other enumeration of our licensing.
If we need to re-license later, we will simply have to contact everyone. And
at some point, in the future, when incorporation is a more viable
possibility, and we are a more mature product, we can incorporate, request
the rights to the code from everyone, and move forward with whatever
lopsided dual-licensing scheme we chose at that point.
But at this point, we have to settle for a compromise that will work, and
work for a period of probably about 2-5 years.
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