OVPL - wrap-up of objections

[Alex Bligh]

--On 21 July 2005 16:41 -0700 "Wilson, Andrew" <andrew.wilson at intel.com> 
wrote:

> Re: the "submarine modifications" problem, you could also modify OVPL
> to state that Modifications *must* be posted to a public Web site for
> some minimum
> period of time (say 12 months).  That way, a sufficiently motivated ID
> could build a web crawler that would find all Modifications.

This doesn't work - most people do this anyway for things that
are significant. The trouble is it would also cover (say) Joe at
OneCo who wants to send a test bug-fix to Jane at TwoCo. OneCo's
lawyer correctly points out this would require posting this to a web
site for 12 months. Joe feels it would be impractical to post to a web
site every bit of email traffic that might include a bit of OVPL code,
so the OVPL would be impractical.

That's why you need to give someone else the burden of chasing these
things up, rather than an unconditional requirement on the distributor.
It's possible that allowing ANYONE to request this would work, on the
basis that it could be satisfied by the relevant distributor by putting
the code onto a web page.

> This is indeed an interesting proposal that has many good qualities.
> Of course, as I stated in my initial
> wrap-up, you could remove both of my objections to OVPL as it is today
> with a snip here and a snip there.  Make sec. 3.3 optional, and
> establish an audit trail by saying contributors can opt in to 3.3 by
> sending a signed copy of the agreement to the ID.

Making 3.3 optional entirely defeats the purpose. Making 3.3 work on
BSD lines I am still thinking about.

Alex