Request opinion on proposed license

Kevin Halle seanhalle at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 29 11:08:00 UTC 2004


Hello,

   Thank you all for considering my message.  I am considering
submitting a request for approval of a new license.  Before
formally submitting it, I would like to elicit the opinions of
you, the members of this list, on whether it is likely to pass
the Open Source Initiative requirements.
   The new license is meant for a parallel programming platform,
which includes an Operating System, a Virtual Machine
definition, and a Language.  As such, the hope is that it, or
software like it, will become a de-facto standard in five to ten
years time.  In this role, it would be the base upon which a
wide range of software is developed.
   The motivation for the license is to provide the highest
possible level of quality assurance, documentation, and project
management, as well as a coherent, uniform standard that all
distributions adhere to, which is critical to gaining acceptance
outside of the highly-technical community.
   I believe that the highest levels of quality assurance and
documentation can only be provided with monetary support. 
Further, an active testing program and a body capable of
enforcing conformance also requires monetary support, in my
opinion, in order to be maximally effective at guaranteeing
coherence.
   Thus, I propose a new license which modifies the GPL.  It
carries the same language, with the one exception that a
third-party organisation is named which has the power to
negotiate with commercial entities.   

   This negotiation may allow proprietary, non-open source
derivative works to be sold by the commercial entity.  In
exchange, the third-party organisation receives royalties which
it uses to hire professional QA, fix bugs, write documentation,
and develop a conformance test suite.  The commercial entity has
to pass the conformance test suite in order to maintain its
rights to distribute the derivative work non-open source.
   The derivative work must still maintain all other aspects of
the GPL, including distributing source for the pre-derivative
work the derivative is based upon, and including a copy of the
new license.
   For non-commercial entities, such as researchers and
individual developers, the license reverts to the standard GPL,
with the one exception that any derivatives may only use the
name of the original work upon condition that they pass the
conformance test suite.  If they fail the conformance suite or
are not tested with it, they must include a notice stating that
the work is derived from the original but has failed the
conformance suite.
   Distributions of patches is allowed, however, if the work
compiled with the patches fails the conformance suite or is not
tested with it, the notice of being derived from the original
but failing conformance must be included.

   The third-party entity charged with negotiating with
commercial entities must be a non-profit organisation committed
solely to carrying out the responsibilities of managing work
assigned to it under the new license.

Will a license such as this be certifiable as Open Source?  

Thank you for your time,  sincerely,

Kevin Sean Halle




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