Simple Public License, Please Review

[Justin Wells]

Hi David, 

Thanks for your comments! You are one of the people whose comments I was
really hoping to get when posting this license to the list.


On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 06:15:08PM -0700, David Johnson wrote:
> >From the features listed (I haven't read the license yet):
> 
> > Hands the community the power to take action against violators of 
> > the license--even if the original author is not around, has lost 
> > interest, or doesn't have the time or money.
> 
> Uh, why? I haven't read the license terms for this yet, but it sounds
> like it means to overturn centuries of legal precedence.

One word: community.

My reasoning is that with many opensource projects the original
author may vanish. Someone else takes over maintaing the project,
but may not have the authority to defend the license. Thus when
the original author vanishes, people may infringe without fear:
nobody has standing to take action.

I think this is wrong.

I think that free software is meant to be maintained by the community,
and therefore the community should have the power to defend the free
software license. Obviously people would only go to this expense if they
had some interest in defending the software from a violation of its free
software licnse--but that is OK by me.

> When someone violates the license of a piece of software, no one is
> injured except the copyright holder. The users certainly aren't, moral
> outrage is not injury.

Free software developers, using a viral license, may have developed 
software with the expectation that commercial competitors would not have
had recourse to the community efforts available to the free software folk.
It damages the free software community, in my view, when a proprietary 
developer can exploit the free software movement's efforts without 
releasing code back to the community. My license is designed to enforce
this point of view.


> > Requires that all other modifications be shared with the community,
> > even if they aren't distributed. Thus you can't hide your improvements
> > behind an application server.
> 
> I know where you're coming from with this, but this is too big of a
> step. If I haven't distributed the modifications, then that is just
> that -- I haven't distributed any. How I *use* the application is
> none of the author's business in this community. This isn't a
> requirement to be open, it is a requirement to be buck naked!

My main intent here is to require application servers to share their 
code even though they don't distribute it. I can't think of any concise
way to say that though, so I simply included everything. One of the goals
of this license was to be short, and concise. I don't want to be 11 pages
like the LGPL--I have managed to hold the license to two pages (120 lines).

Also, I worded this broadly partly to avoid the fields of endeavour
restraing in the OSD: I don't want to write any language specifically
discriminating against people who write application servers.

If you can think of a simple, concise way to say this that would cover 
application servers without undue restrictions on other people then I 
would really appreciate it and I would probably include it in the SPL.

Justin