On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 03:35:31PM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
Without creating needless FUD, let me say that someone did recently
point out possible implications of the BSD license that we did not
intend. Fairly awkward implications.
1) It may well be possible to fix that with a clarification.
2) But suppose that it were harder to fix, and that it were discovered 4
months from now.
At that point we need to fix the license to match our intentions.
No, we need to change the licence to match the intentions _or_ accept
that the damage was done, too bad, and move on.
Note that the latter approach is actually the compromise that's been
worked out in respect of some other rights and explicit granting of
them: instead of forcing contributors to make absurd claims about
having explicitly obtained rights throughout history, we give them a
way to say, "Maybe I haven't got all the rights. Be careful about
relicencing this."
There is nothing we can do, for good or ill, about folks who already
used the earlier license. But we can fix things going forward.
Harald argued earlier that you _can't_ fix things once you've released
something, at least in any more-restrictive way: once you've released
the code under some licence, whoever has the code under that licence
automatically can use those terms. Since we've been talking about the
BSD licence, then anyone can republish any of the code under BSD
terms. So you might as well just leave the licence on the
already-published things alone, and just change the rules for new
publication. This has the happy property of not opening up some giant
legal sinkhole where the exact same code embedded in the exact same
document gets a different licence depending on the time of day someone
downloads it, and from whom.
Since this is only about the rights we grant to folks in our documents,
not about the rights folks grant to us, it seems simplest to write
things in a way that gives us the flexibility we should have.
I am claiming that you cannot write things in a way that gives you the
ability to do what you want (which is, in effect, to undo an action
the results of which you don't find congenial). I moreover note that
some people are expressing concerns about the way the Trust is
operating, and the proposed change moves one more thing from
"community agrees on a rule change" to "Trust informs community about
a change of rules". And therefore, since I claim you can't get the
benefit you want anyway, there's no reason to make the change.
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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