[License-review] Next steps with Tidepool License

[Howard Look]

Dear OSI Members,

Thank you all for your extended engagement and feedback over the last couple of months with respect to the Tidepool License.

We got great feedback to our proposed Tidepool License. We had an exciting and productive discussion, but we all came away with the feeling that we have a lot more work still to do on it.

The process has made it clear is that getting a new open source license right is hard - especially one with novel concepts such as the Tidepool License. We need to spend more time carefully considering all of the use cases. Different communities (academics, medical researchers, device manufacturers, patients, etc.) have different requirements, and it’s a challenge to balance all of those needs.

We had been hoping that the process would happen relatively quickly, and we have been waiting until the license was ready before opening up our code publicly. But not developing our code in the open is slowing us down. Tidepool’s vision for an open data platform depends critically on having many eyes on it -- user interface design, API design, testing, and development will all benefit from community commentary and contributions. We have had several people who have offered to contribute, but it’s been challenging to effectively integrate them into our process when our development is happening in private repositories.

We’ve decided we can’t wait any longer. Here’s what we’re going to do for now:

- We’re going to keep working with everyone interested on the Tidepool License. If you’d like to propose changes, we have a GitHub repository with the license text available and we will gladly consider pull requests for changes. We can also use GitHub issues for discussion. For those that prefer an email discussion list, we also set up this Google Group.

- For most of the existing Tidepool code base, we will be releasing the code under the BSD 2-Clause license (a.k.a. BSD-2). 

- For code where keeping changes secret or private would be a safety concern, we will release the code under GPLv2. This will compel people who edit this code to release their changes back to the public.

At some point in the future, when we feel we have achieved a reasonable consensus on the Tidepool License and attained OSI compliance, we’ll relicense future versions of the code under that license. But this plan allows us all to move forward. If you’re motivated to help us continue development of the Tidepool License, we’d love to have you. Please join us on GitHub and/or this Google Group.

Once again, thank you for all your help and advice. We hope you’ll continue to help us as we continue in our quest.

Regards,
Howard
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