Simple Public License, Please Review

[Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.]

Be careful. Free software is not exactly public domain, which is what I
think you have in mind. Only the copyright holder can go into court to
enforce the copyright. Hence, it is not just better, but necessary, to
transfer copyright to some entity, if you want to avoid the vanishing
copyright holder problem.

Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.
www.cyberspaces.org
rod at cyberspaces.org


> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Johnson [mailto:david at usermode.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 2:15 AM
> To: Justin Wells
> Cc: justin at semiotek.com; Justin Wells; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: Simple Public License, Please Review
>
>
> On Tue, 04 Apr 2000, Justin Wells wrote:
> > 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 a much better solution to this is to do what some people
> already do: assign copyright to an organization whose judgement they
> trust, typically the FSF. This would be much safer than assigning
> rights to sue to unknown folks.
>
> > I think that free software is meant to be maintained by the community
>
> Apropos my above comment, this is a very good reason to assign the
> copyright to a community based organization. If one doesn't believe that
> individuals should own software, then it's pretty silly for them to hold
> onto the copyright.
>
> > 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.
>
> This may be a good place for a "public performance" clause. People
> would still be allowed private modifications, but an application server
> accessible to the public would probably count as a public performance.
> This would probably also cover CORBA and Java classes.
>
> --
> David Johnson...
> _____________________________
> http://www.usermode.org
>