discuss: Bento Poetic License (resubmission)

[Michael St . Hippolyte]

> On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Michael St . Hippolyte wrote:
> > I'm not sure the situations are comparable.  Our license does not
> > require adherence to a standard, it just forbids false claims of
> > adherence.

On 2002.07.21 22:43 Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> I think in Sun's opinion it ends up being a distinction without
> a useful difference.  If someone forked their code and called the
> result "Javuh" or "OpenJava", or if someone duplicated yours and
> called it "Bentoh" or "OpenBento", then it might be hard to
> effectively fight.  It becomes a battle of who's brand is stronger,
> and I think they assumed that a certain company in Redmond could
> always out-spend and thus out-brand them.

Yes, that's true.  Our license as it reads wouldn't stand in their
way.  But for that precise reason, the commercial value of Bento as
a brand is limited.  A vigorously guarded, tightly controlled brand
such as Java is inherently attractive to a large software company
whose business strategy centers on achieving effective monopolies
for its products.

With Bento, the code, the standard and even the brand are free for
the taking to anyone who wants them.  The restrictions in our
license are minimally burdensome on purpose in order to encourage
such proliferation while blocking only the most malicious attempts
at subverting the standard ("contradicting the language
specification", in the words of our license, as opposed to merely
failing to fully implement the specification, or even offering
custom extensions, both of which are explicitly permitted).
Our belief is that in the event that Bento turns out to be
valuable enough to catch the eye of a hypothetical rapacious
software giant, it will also have attracted enough other parties
that the constituency for following the standard would go well
beyond our own shallow pockets.

Isn't such an approach qualitatively more in the spirit of open
source than a Sun-type approach built on tight control of the
code and vigorous trademark enforcement?

Michael
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