Get ready....

[Derek J. Balling]

At 10:40 PM 4/14/99 -0500, Jacques Vidrine wrote:
>I doubt that you'd be able to come up with a ``one size almost fits
>all'' license.
>
>I think GPL is one extreme in which many organizations may be
>interested.
>
>I think that a BSD/X/Apache style license is another with which even
>more organizations could be comfortable.
>
>I think it would be great if OSI could endorse a license of each of
>these types to hold up as examples, and for organizations to adopt.

Yes, yes, yes... exactly.

I would FURTHER go so far as to allow alteration of the licenses, but that
the "lineage" must be documented, so that people familiar with [for lack of
a better term] the OSI-BSD license (whatever they come up with) can say,
"Ah, this license from Acme is based on the BSD license, but they changed
it somehow. How did they change it I wonder?" and then they'll find out via
diff/etc.  They'll know all the rest of it as "tried and true" so to speak,
and then dig down to the alterations that a particular company needed for
their particular business model.

statistically, the fewer changes to the baseline the better, obviously.

We WANT companies to embrace Open Source as much as their business model
allows.

We WANT to make it fairly easy for companies to do so, providing them with
a working framework, but one which MAY require alteration for their
business model.

We WANT users to be familiar with the "root" OS licenses, and be
comfortable with what's in them.

We DON'T want a user to have to read through each and every OS license
because there's no "Standardization" to it (e.g., Acme Co may have based
much of their license on OSI-BSD license, but if I don't know the parentage
and diff it accordingly, then I have to sift through the whole thing to
look it over for problems, or pay my lawyer to do so).

Does ANYONE agree with me here?

D