For Approval: Open Vendor Public License (OVPL) and Open Vendor Lesser Public License (OVLPL)

[Wilson, Andrew]

Alex Bligh wrote: 

> You are quite correct that IF every contributor signed a contribution
> agreement, then the effect would not doubt be the same (for the
initial
> developer) as the OVPL/OVLPL at least in terms of the license-back.
>
> However, there are the following problems with this:
>
> 1. Not every contributor will in practice sign a contribution
agreement.

That's exactly right, and I consider that a feature and not a bug.
Again, the BKM is Sun with Open Office/Star Office.  You are free to
take 
the Open Office code under LGPL or SISL and distribute modifications on
your own, or, you may choose to submit modifications for inclusion in
the mainline version, in which case you must agree to the additional
Ts and Cs in the contributor's agreement.  Freedom of choice is
important.  Also, IANAL, but to my non-lawyer mind, requiring a
signed contributor's agreement (e.g. a contract) between the parties
puts the license back on a more
sound footing than having it as a provision in a bare license.

Note that I am not philosophically opposed to licenses with special
rights for the initial developer; nor to licensing schemes specifically
designed
to enable parallel free and commercial releases from a common code
base; and heck, I'm not even philosophically opposed to new open
source licenses (although license proliferation is a real issue, and
you need a darned good reason to inflict a new open source license
on those of us who have to track all of them).
But: there is more than a whiff of coercion in the mandatory
license-back to the ID in OVPL/OVLPL, and coercion is inappropriate
in an open source license.  So, I'm stuck at -1.

Andy Wilson
Intel Open Source Technology Center