discuss: Bento Poetic License (resubmission)

[Michael St . Hippolyte]

On 2002.07.19 20:12 John Cowan wrote:
> 
> There are, however, other ways to do it.
> 
> 1) License the code under an ordinary Open Source license, whichever
> one you like.  License the trademark "Bento" only to people whose
> implementation meets your definition.

There are a number of reasons why we believe trademark enforcement
is not as good an option.  Bento is a free language, in both the
free-speech and free-beer senses of the term.  Trademarks are
designed to protect commercial interests, and Bento has arguably
no commercial value, since anyone can get it or give it away for
free.

Trademarks are like patents in that they are expensive to
secure and expensive to defend, and if you don't defend them you
forfeit them.  But as a free language, Bento can't afford a
trademark lawyer.

More fundamentally, our goal is not to replicate the stingy approach
Sun takes with Java, but to turn things around and make freedom the
default case.  I got busted a few years ago by Sun's lawyers for a
library I wrote called JavaMidi.  The only one allowed to call any
piece of software Java-anything is Sun.  We don't want that with
Bento.  We want the presumption to be that it's OK to do what you
want with Bento, both the software and the term.  Rather than
specify what you can call Bento, we want to specify, very narrowly,
what you can't call Bento, namely works derived from our copyrighted
material which fail a particular test but are represented otherwise.

> 2) License your code under an ordinary Open Source license etc.
> Make "Bento" a certification mark.  This involves splitting off an
> independent 3rd party which can certify your implementation and that
> of other people as meeting the standard which you are certifying.
> (IMHO Sun should have done this with Java).

There is great value in such a certification mark, but we don't want
to tie the use of the term Bento to certification.  Better to define
a separate certification mark such as "Bento Conformant" or "Bento
Certified" based on strict criteria.  But this is a separate goal.
The restrictions in the Poetic License are intentionally permissive,
allowing all sorts of nonconformances.  We don't want developers to
have to prove they are using our code appropriately in order to use
it at all.

Michael St. Hippolyte
bentodev.org
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3