Why?

[David Presotto]

I can answer it for the Lucent public license at least.  We write
code for a living and would like to share as much of it as
possible with the outside, both because it makes us feel good
and because it increases the number of people making it better.
For that copy-center or copy-left would work.  However, to be
most useful to the rest of the company, we need to let our
code also be mixable with proprietary stuff in the company.
We could do lots of bookkeeping to separate what we wrote
from what others wrote and keep two versions ove everyting,
or we could settle on copy-center and not bother.  We did
the latter.

I originally approached our lawyers with the BSD license and
they said much what you did, i.e., `You call this a license?'.

The first problem was that the BSD wording was inadequate for
covering our corporate ass.  As a large company, we get sued
a lot.  If we were making a lot of money as a result of the
code, then we'ld just set some of it aside to pay for the
lawsuits.  However, at least in the case of Plan 9, we don't.
Therefore, there is more disclaimer wording and an indemnification
clause added so that we're less liable for what some redistributor
does with or promises about our code.  If we were a government,
like the state of california is, we probably wouldn't want more
than the disclaimer in the BSD license since people would have
a hard time suing us anyways (Is california even solvent these
days?)

BSD is also a bit lacking of any wording about patent rights
that go with the code.  We want to make sure that when anyone
uses our code they also get access to the patents embodied by it
(and the same of us using anyone else's contributions).

Finally, our lawyers wanted termination language.  If someone
doesn't abide by the rest of the license, there has to be a
way to revoke their rights to it.

The IBM Public License has all of that so we made ours by
doing the minimal changes to make it copy-center instead
of copy-left.  In hindsight, we probably should have started
with the CPL instead, though the result would be largely the
same.

By the way, in anser to:

> Are we really afraid that we will be sued for
> damages by something we give away for free
> (as in free beer)?

the recipient may not have gotten your code for free.  Anyone
can redistribute for money as part of something they build or
just with better packaging and/or support.  The original
contributors can and will be sued for anything that goes
wrong; its the american way.  You can get sued for patent
infringement if the combination of something you build
and something someone else adds to it steps on a patent.
Try giving teenagers free beer here and see what happens
after the car accident.
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3