Two new licenses - OVPL & OVLPL

[Alex Bligh]

--On 10 April 2005 10:14 -0700 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:

> Technically, I think you could use the existing CDDL or even another
> license and make the right to relicense a separate document which must be
> entered into in order for a modification to be accepted into your own
> code tree. This is the case with some Sun projects where the Joint
> Copyright Assignment is used as a separate document from the license.

That would have a slightly different effect.

Under the OVPL, a contributor distribution modifications MUST license those
to the ID (the additional grant). Under your scheme, a contributor may
decline to do so. Yes, there is a penalty in that the ID may not put it in
"his tree". However, this leads to the ID wanting features like "pristine
tree + diffs" distribution requirements, which for various good reasons is
unpopular (we were persuaded by previous argument on this list). It also
does not give the same advantages in terms of relicensing etc. Further
more, it's very paperwork intensive.

Note when comparing to the CDDL, there are other differences beyond the
additional grant. The main one is that the CDDL is entirely (source) file
based or seems to be intended that way. Read the (wider) description of
"Modifications" in the OVPL. As any executable distributed must be
distributed in source form, Covered Software plus Modifications, you cannot
combine OVPL code with proprietary code (only with other OVPL code). In
this respect it is rather more like MPL (the CDDL was used as a base
because it tidied a lot of other things up). You cannot even combine OVLPL
code with proprietary code - the difference is you can combine it with
other open source code under some circumstances (e.g. library usage) to
promote license compatibility. Well that's the intent.

Alex