[License-discuss] Freely published and hosted Open Source License Compendium [in an early state]

[Reincke, Karsten]

Dear Open Source (License) Community,

As recently indicated, Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) has now published the initial, very early version of an Open Source License Compendium. It is 

a) licensed under the 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany' [http://dtag-dbu.github.com/oslic/en/oslic/license.html],

b) published as an eBook (pdf) [http://dtag-dbu.github.com/oslic/en/planning/results.html]

c) realized by a LaTeX based 'development environment' hosted as an open and free GitHub project [https://github.com/dtag-dbu/oslic]

We describe our intention in our home page (also hosted on GitHub) [http://dtag-dbu.github.com/oslic/] and specify the cooperation as far as it's possible for the moment [http://dtag-dbu.github.com/oslic/en/collaboration/repository.html]. Additionally, the items of the column 'download' explain how to prepare, how to obtain, how to install, and how to use the development environment. [Anyway, you will directly see, that we find a solution for solving our logo challenge ;-)]

Please feel free to visit/review our work. But don't be too disappointed: publishing early and often means starting with a nearly 'empty' release, however we have created the skeleton of the compendium and begun fleshing out the sections. Nevertheless any comments are welcome!

And now some additional details:

Scope :

Large (IT) companies are particularly challenged by the quantity of licenses and their various versions. It is becoming quite expensive for each company to allocate and train employees as "Open Source License Experts" in order to ensure that the company acts according to those Open Source licenses touched by their projects. A better solution would be to have something like a "compendium" which lists all relevant usage scenarios, and offers for the major Open Source licenses something like a to-do list that describes what one has to do in order to fulfill the license conditions applicable to these usage scenarios. As far as we know such a reliable compendium doesn't exist at the moment.

Following the spirit of Open Source Software, DTAG has published this compendium under the 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany' License and wants to follow the rule 'publish early, publish often' for developing this compendium together with the community.

Not in scope :

To be clear, it is not our task to describe all possible ways to fulfill a license. Particularly we do not want to discuss special cases and the ways of specific companies. This must remain the tasks of lawyers and state specific experts. Instead of this we want to offer one reliable way for each Open Source use case and each Open Source License to act according to the requirements. We want to find something like the traffic rule of thumb: Stay at red light, drive at green light (and let the other experts discuss whether it might be allowed to drive through yellow in this case - or if in this specific case the color is not red, but still very dark yellow.)

Happy Coding (for (re)activating a famous salutation)
Karsten Reincke, John Dobson,  Greg Sharpe, Peter Schichl, Michael Kern 

---
Deutsche Telekom AG
Products & Innovation
Karsten Reincke, PMP®
Fach-Senior Manager T&P/A&S/TM
T-Online-Allee 1
64295 Darmstadt
Tel.: +49 6151 680 - 8941
Fax.: +49 6151 680 - 2529
E-Mail k.reincke at telekom.de
http://www.telekom.de/

Erleben, was verbindet.
Deutsche Telekom AG
Aufsichtsrat: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Lehner (Vorsitzender)
Vorstand: René Obermann (Vorsitzender), Dr. Manfred Balz, Reinhard Clemens, Niek Jan van Damme, Timotheus Höttges, Claudia Nemat, Thomas Sattelberger
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Bonn HRB 6794
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Bonn
WEEE-Reg.-Nr.: DE50478376
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