Simple Public License, Please Review

[David Johnson]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2000, Justin Wells wrote:
> My reasoning is that with many opensource projects the original
> author may vanish. Someone else takes over maintaing the project,
> but may not have the authority to defend the license. Thus when
> the original author vanishes, people may infringe without fear:
> nobody has standing to take action.

I think a much better solution to this is to do what some people
already do: assign copyright to an organization whose judgement they
trust, typically the FSF. This would be much safer than assigning
rights to sue to unknown folks.

> I think that free software is meant to be maintained by the community

Apropos my above comment, this is a very good reason to assign the
copyright to a community based organization. If one doesn't believe that
individuals should own software, then it's pretty silly for them to hold
onto the copyright.

> If you can think of a simple, concise way to say this that would cover 
> application servers without undue restrictions on other people then I 
> would really appreciate it and I would probably include it in the SPL.

This may be a good place for a "public performance" clause. People
would still be allowed private modifications, but an application server
accessible to the public would probably count as a public performance.
This would probably also cover CORBA and Java classes.

-- 
David Johnson...
_____________________________
http://www.usermode.org