Viral permissiveness
Steve Thomas
steve.thomas.private at googlemail.com
Tue Apr 21 14:13:33 UTC 2009
Hi again
No joy as yet regarding pro bono advice. The self-imposed deadline for
the charity 'Scottish Business in the Community' [1] expires in 1
week, but I was told by their friendly and doubtless capable
representative that I'd be unlikely to receive help. After that, I'll
phone the IP practices here in Edinburgh and Glasgow one-by-one.
There's an academic at the Edinburgh University School of Law (Mr
Andres Guadamuz [2]) who has published many analytical papers on FOSS,
but I'll not approach him yet for fear of "Free" software bias. That's
no reflection at all on him, mind, but rather on my now-suspicious
nature re academia, lawyers and lawyers in academe.
However ...
I've enclosed a draft (v0.01) of a license I've been working on. It's
a modification of the OSL v3.0. The idea is to license the collective
work of elided code fragments, partitioned into files residing in
directories, and to license various (in practice, most) individual
fragments under this license too. The provisional name is the 'Very
Reciprocative License'. Section 1(c) should be of most interest. The
license would exist in two variants: one with, and one without, clause
1(c)(iv). It allows 'academic' licenses (terminology following Rosen
in [3]) to be "internally viral". Have a look, you'll see what I mean.
I'd be delighted to hear any of your comments. You've all already been
most helpful. My intention, if our moderator allows, is to iron out
problems with the contract here and with any pro-bono help I'm
fortunate enough to receive, and to also solicit further opinion here
before formal submission for OSI approval.
Thanks for your help thus far,
Steve
[1] http://www.sbcscot.com
[2] http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/staff/andresguadamuz
[3] http://rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm
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