ATT SOURCE CODE AGREEMENT Version 1.2C

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Thu, Sep 09, 1999 at 10:21:32PM +0000, bruce at perens.com quoted:

>                             SOURCE CODE AGREEMENT
> 
>                                 Version 1.2C

This brings up a question that I was planning to ask anyway.

Is there an open source licence which allows the possibility of
encumbered code?

I'm currently implementing a certain encumbered API, which requires a
free (as in "free beer") licence, even for commercial use.  I'm not sure
of the exact wording of the licence (I haven't obtained one yet), but I
understand that all it says is that the implementor will not infringe
any of that company's intellectual property, with the strong implication
that you should find a way to implement it which doesn't use techniques
covered by that company's patents.  (This is a straightforward thing to
do.)

One way to go would be the same way that Mesa got around the OpenGL
licence: by not claiming compliance and releasing under the GPL.
That's a neat solution which I could probably get away with, but if I
ever wanted to sell the software commercially, it would be better to be
able to claim compliance.

Probably a licence which only allows distributions of modifications
via patches (QPL-style) would fit the bill, but that doesn't fit nicely
with a bazaar development model, which I may choose to adopt.

Another possibility is to split the software.  I could implement the
meat of the code using my own API and release it LGPL, then implement
the "real" API using a very thin layer of code as an adapter and release
that as proprietary or QPL.  It's kinda ugly to use such a mix of
licences, but it would work.  (Of course the bridge between the adapter
and the meat of the code could be implemented in many ways, if I didn't
want to use the LGPL.  A CORBA bridge, for example, might be a nice
solution.)

Anyway, this AT&T licence works if the originating author is the same
as the patent holder, but it doesn't help me very much.

What I really want is a licence which is copyleft (i.e. affords the
same protections and allows the same freedoms as the GPL) with the
proviso that if you want to fork the tree, you have to ensure that you
obtain the relevant free licences, which would be declared somewhere
in the licence.  If you modify the code sufficiently as to remove the
encumberance, then you could have the option of releasing under the
GPL.  If you add more encumberance, you must declare it, and the
encumberance must be of a form such that it at least allows free
distrubution and use for non-commercial purposes.

Or something like it.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?  I don't want to have to
write a new licence.  I hate legalese and want to avoid confusion if
I can.

Of course in a perfect world we wouldn't have encumbered APIs or
algorithms.  Indeed, here in Australia we don't have software patents,
so I could probably get away with ignoring the whole mess, so long as
I didn't allow the US to use it. :-)

Thanks in advance, etc.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage