For Approval: TrueCrypt Collective License Version 2.0

[Lawrence Rosen]

> Yes, we plan to submit the component licenses separately after this
> license (including its component licenses) is approved as a whole. This
> is very important to us, as we cannot distribute our product under only
> one of the component licenses. We need OSI approval of the license as a
> whole. In our opinion, if the three component licenses were approved
> only separately, we could not claim that TrueCrypt is distributed under
> an OSI-approved license. We need to define relationships between the
> component licenses and their domains (for example, the component
> licenses use the phrase "this product", which could mislead the
> licensee, as none of the component licenses actually applies to the
> product as a whole). In our opinion, none of these things could be
> achieved if the component licenses were submitted separately.

I don't understand this point. 

The entire SpikeSource stack is distributed as a collective work under a
single OSL 3.0 license. Individual components of that stack (including
Linux, MySQL, JBoss, Apache, and Python/PHP/Perl) are licensed by their
authors under a variety of other open source (and a very few binary)
licenses. Some of those stack components require additional licenses for
commercial use, but that's explained up front so users aren't surprised.

What's the problem you're trying to solve?

/Larry

Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
Stanford University, Lecturer in Law
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
707-485-1242  *  fax: 707-485-1243
Author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and 
                Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall 2004)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tomas Novak [mailto:counsel at truecrypt.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:30 AM
> To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: For Approval: TrueCrypt Collective License Version 2.0
> 
> Matthew Seth Flaschen wrote:
> 
> > All of these licenses should be submitted separately, to allow their
> > separate use.
> 
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> Yes, we plan to submit the component licenses separately after this
> license (including its component licenses) is approved as a whole. This
> is very important to us, as we cannot distribute our product under only
> one of the component licenses. We need OSI approval of the license as a
> whole. In our opinion, if the three component licenses were approved
> only separately, we could not claim that TrueCrypt is distributed under
> an OSI-approved license. We need to define relationships between the
> component licenses and their domains (for example, the component
> licenses use the phrase "this product", which could mislead the
> licensee, as none of the component licenses actually applies to the
> product as a whole). In our opinion, none of these things could be
> achieved if the component licenses were submitted separately.
> 
> 
> > You should also templatitize the license
> 
> Yes, we already considered that. However, it is impossible to
> templatize the whole TrueCrypt Collective License (TCL). The problem is
> that the text of the E4M component license cannot be changed, so it
> cannot be templatized. We plan to submit the TrueCrypt component
> license in a templatized form after the TCL is approved.
> 
> 
> Thank you very much for your suggestions.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Tomas Novak
> 
> TrueCrypt Foundation
> http://www.truecrypt.org/