Get ready....

[Rob Edgeworth]

I would agree with Mark on all points.

An important consequence of the reuse of license concept is the need for the
licenses themselves to be without encumbrances.

I think it is important to establish right off the bat that any open source
license is public domain (or better yet GPL'd).  Otherwise we may see the
day that Company A gets an injunction against publication of Organization
B's software because some of the license was cribbed from Company A.

Rob Edgeworth
Center for Precision Metrology
University of NC at Charlotte

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Rafn <dagon at halcyon.com>
Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org <license-discuss at opensource.org>
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 3:39 PM
Subject: Re: Get ready....


>> At 06:41 PM 4/14/99 +0000, Russell Nelson wrote:
>> >As is right, fitting and proper, they are going to anonymize the
>> >license.  I've requested that it be rendered in postscript form (as
>> >opposed to some grotty proprietary word processing format), so if you
>> >can't render postscript (using ghostview or gv), work on it.
>
>On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Derek J. Balling wrote:
>> Not to pick nits, but why not request it in HTML format? Something every
>> platform out there can use with minimal effort.
>
>May I recommend ASCII text (in addition to whatever other formats you
>like)?  It's almost certainly going to end up as a textfile called LICENSE
>in the distribution anyway.  More importatly, it allows easy listing of
>changes between various versions of the license.
>
>On an unrelated note, I assume their lawyers generated this license from
>scratch.  Why not use the open-source model for licenses as well?  Take a
>well-liked license (I'd recommend Perl's Artistic License, but there are
>many others) and change what you must in order to fit your specific
>requirements.
>
>Publishing diffs off of an already-reviewed license would make it much
>easier to give feedback, and would allow people to concentrate on
>intentional changes in the contract rather than having to nitpick every
>single paragraph.  Also, it would encourage others to use this approach
>when _they_ want to give something to the community, and we can eventually
>spend less time bickering about license-of-the-week and more time creating
>and using the software.
>
>I'm of the opinion that license interoperability among different packages
>is nearly as important as technical interoperabity.  One way to achieve
>this is to standardize licenses like we [try to] standardize protocols.
>--
>Mark Rafn    dagon at halcyon.com    <http://www.halcyon.com/dagon/>   !G
>
>