OVPL and open ownership

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Jul 23, 2005, at 2:06 AM, David Barrett wrote:

> In the case of typical dual licensing, the community owns the code, 
> and continously grants the initial developer extra privileges as a 
> reward for "good behavior".  If the ID in a current dual-licensing 
> scheme starts acting poorly, the community will just stop going 
> through the extra effort to grant him special rights
>
> In the case of the OVPL, the *initial developer* owns the code, and 
> continously grants the community the right to modify it so long as 
> it's advantageous to him.  However, there's no way for the community 
> to reject the ID because they're not in charge.
>
> [snip]
>
> I recall that one of the existing OSI licenses (I can't recall which 
> one, unfortunately) gave the contributor an option to either accept 
> the license as is, or to remove a part of the license and submit it 
> under that.  I wonder if the OVPL could do something similar, and give 
> the contributor the right to remove section 3.3 in its entirety, and 
> thus explicitly deny the initial developer his special rights.

Hmm, David, if you are willing to go this far then you are really 
moving away from what the OVPL intents (I don't think making 3.3 
optional will be acceptable to Alex's client). I've been following the 
discussion all along and your intention seemed not to be adequately 
addressed by the Copyback license. But with your latest statements 
you've moved significantly in this direction. The main remaining 
difference is that the Copyback license also allows others to create 
proprietary derivative works as long as they fulfill the copyback 
obligation. In all other regards I think it addresses your original 
concerns better than what you are proposing now.

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Chris

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