For Approval: Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Sun Feb 1 06:03:27 UTC 2009


Russ Nelson writes:
 > zooko writes:
 >  > It is vitally important that people do not conflate TGPPL with OSL.   
 > 
 > No, it isn't.  I explained why.

Ahhh, I see.  It's because licensee has the freedom to publish without
the waiver.  I know that we live in a litageous society, where
everything is thought to be subject to the whim of the courts.  Some
things need to be solved through community.  Basically, if the
licensee is actively hostile to the intent of this project, then
perhaps you would rather do without their contribution.  Remember, at
the point at which any of this matters, you've already gotten into a
situation where the licensor has stopped accepting changes from the
licensee.  There's got to be a reason for that.  To then force the
licensee to give these unwanted changes back to the licensor .... if
you don't want them, you don't want them.

The way to do this is 1) with a waiver and 2) a contributor's
agreement which says "We'll take your code, but only if you allow us
to publish it with the TGPPL waiver".

If somebody can't live with that, then perhaps your experiment has
failed?  If it's to fail, better to find out before we approve the
license, right?

Run your experiment, using the OSL and a waiver.  Later on, if you
have a licensee who doesn't see the value of the waiver, come back to
us and when confronted with a real, as opposed to imagined, problem, I
think you'll get a different reaction.

-- 
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Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  |     Sheepdog          | (Not a GOP supporter).



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