new license to review

Creed Erickson creed at apple.com
Sat May 8 02:50:11 UTC 1999


>Hurray.   What would be ideal, is to develop common 
>set of underlying clauses and algebraic rules for
>combining those clauses.  Say that a decomposition
>lead to 26 clauses,  A..Z,
>
>Then each OS license would be defined in
>terms of these clauses.  So that 
>
>Artistic =  A, B, C,    F, G,       Y
>BSD      =  A,    C, D, F,          Y
>GNU      =     B     D, F, G, H, I, 
>
>And then you have rules which define how
>the licenses combine (as you combine the
>source code they are licensed with)
>
>I started to do this about a year ago, 
>it _could_ be done, provided many of the
>groups participated in a more unified
>licensing mechanism.  It seems OS would
>be a good way to do this.

I like the concept--plug and play licensing. Alas, my view is too jaded and cynical to see it as a workable solution. Corporate counsel would react to this how? I suspect some--perhaps many--would feel threatened by a lack of 'value-add' on their part and dismiss C, H and W yielding "alternate language", superfluous changes, and YAOSL. (Yet Another...) 


---
Creed Erickson (mailto: creed at apple.com)
Deckhand, H.M.S. Beagle



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