New Licensing Model?

[Charles A. Jolley]

Hi all:
    We have a new technology that we are getting ready to release which is
basically a core standard for communications.  It's objective is to provide
a base standard that can be used as the foundation for all electronic
communications regardless of whether it involves hardware, software,
networks, or not, and regardless of the application.  In other words, we are
trying to do for technology what grammar does for human language: provide a
basic set of rules that everyone can follow, regardless of who is talking or
what they need to discuss, while allowing people to fill in the vocabulary
needed to talk about a particular subject.

    This technology exists as a specification, a set of rules, that we want
to license to people and then certify the use of this technology in their
products.  We are also needing to create some implementations of this
technology (for example, a shared library that provides this functionality
to applications written for Linux via an API), which we are wanting to
release as open-source because we believe in the concept and also so as to
give the widest range of people a chance to play with our technology.  So
now my issue figure out how we can license the technology in a way that
would allow both open-source and non-open-source people to use it.  I wanted
to put out our concept here and get everyone's feedback as to whether or not
this would qualify as "open-source compatible"...

    Basically, we are working on a license for the technology that gives
people free license (as protected by our patents, copyrights, and
trademarks) to use the technology in their products and limited use of the
technology's name in relation to their product, unless they sell it for
commercial use.  If they sell the product, then they must get their product
certified to be compliant by us.

    This license will be "viral" in that any derivatives of a product based
on this license must also carry it and so on and so forth, as long as the
product is still compliant with our technology.  Also, we will allow people
to charge for the cost of burning CDs, etc. without needing to get certified
and we will allow certain people to be exempted from the certification
requirement, such as those who are selling shareware.

    Now, this license only covers use of the technology and its associated
name.  It will work such that it will go **along-side** any other license
for the actual software/hardware.  For example, the open-source software
that we release will be licensed under our license for use of our
technology, but will also be released under a BSD or GPL license for the
software itself.

    My concern here is that such a license cannot be combined with GPL,
which obviously could be a problem since there is so much software out there
based on the GPL and I would want these people to be able to make their
products communicate using our technology if they should so choose.

    So what do you think?  Is this a viable strategy as far as creating an
open-source compatible license is concerned?  Would there be open-source
licenses that this technology license could go along-side of?

Cheers,
-Charles

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Charles A. Jolley
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Chief Technology Officer
Zeratec, Inc.
PH: 785-331-3900
EM: charles.jolley at zeratec.com
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