CA License

Forrest J. Cavalier III forrest at mibsoftware.com
Fri Jul 30 17:54:09 UTC 2004


Hello!  (Welcome to license-discuss!)

(Did I miss a plain text ASCII submission of the license?)

Could you please let us know the essential features of this license
are lacking from any of the 50 other OSI approved licenses?

Secondly, please reconsider your goals, license incompatibility, and the
draconian terms on reselling.  If you are encouraging commercial
contributors, it may better serve you to meet the FSF definition of
"Free Software" license, and maybe even be GPL compatible.

Quoting from the license, I have a question or two....

 > This License is intended to facilitate the commercial distribution of 
 > the Program by any Contributor.

Hey, that's good! But it seems that "What the large print giveth, the
small print taketh away."  No commercial contributor will want to
distribute software under this license, I would predict.

 > However, Contributors may only charge Recipients a one-time, upfront
 > fee for the distribution of the Program.

OK, this also cuts out the consultants who would charge fees for
customer-specific adaptations and modifications.  Not OSD-incompliant,
but maybe not what you want.

 > Contributors may not charge Recipients any recurring charge, license
 > fee, or any ongoing royalty for the Recipient’s exercise of its rights
 > under this License to the Program.

Ambiguous, I think...Is the intent OSD compliance, parsed as:

    Contributors may not charge Recipients
            (any recurring charge,
            license fee,
         or any ongoing royalty)
    for the Recipient’s exercise of its rights under this License to the
    Program.

In which case, why have the items in parens?  Words must be there for
some reason, so does that leave us with this meaning?

    Contributors may not charge Recipients
            1. any recurring charge,

            2. license fee,

         or 3. any ongoing royalty for the Recipient’s exercise of its
               rights under this License to the Program.

which would be NOT OSD compliant, because it places the "exercise of\
rights" phrase attached to "royalty", and therefore precludes charging
Recipients for a software subscription or other work, for example.

I think that rewording in order to clarify this meaning is essential for
OSI approval.



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