Free RewardRights License

[Norbert Bollow]

Hello,
  I'd very much appreciate if you could please review and comment on
the following draft Free RewardRights License (FRRL):

License text:  http://FRRL.info/license
Rationale:     http://FRRL.info/rationale

It is in many ways very similar to (the Last Call draft of) Version 3
of the GNU GPL.

Besides having a much less ideological preamble, the main differences
to GPLv3 are

1. That the FRRL is designed to support several categories of business
   models besides those supported by the GPL, in particular:
   (a) Requiring royalty payments for specified categories of
       commercial use.
   (b) Combining programs with proprietary "presentation elements"
       which don't affect functionality, but which, through providing
       different "look and feel" could improve customers' willingness
       to pay.

2. Compatiblity with GPLv2 and Creative Commons licenses.

3. That the FRRL defines a notion of what it means for recipients to
   be "fully empowered to use, modify and convey the Work" and then
   defines the conditions for conveying the work in terms of the
   requirement that recipients must be "fully empowered to use, modify
   and convey the Work".  I hope that this approach will make the FRRL
   more robust than the FSF's GPLv3 with regard to changes in the
   legal environment that could possibly make some now variants of
   tivoisation and/or MS-Novell-like deals possible.  (However, since
   version 1 of the FRRL will allow relicensing under version 2 of the
   GPL, the protections in the FRRL against tivoisation and/or
   MS-Novell-like deals are relatively weak until most GPLv3 projects
   have upgraded to a later version of the GPL so that the GPLv2
   compatibility can be dropped from the FRRL without losing license
   compatibility with the majority of active GPL-based projects.)

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                    http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG  http://SIUG.ch