The agreement was to let the trust work out the legal details. This
document is intended to tell the trust what we want, clearly and
unambiguously. The current text is unambiguous. If we start trying to
say that this or that specific license is a good starting point, then
they have to figure out what aspects of that license we mean.
I certainly would not want to try to tell the lawyers what possible
models there are to do their job.
Collapsing several other related notes:
No, I don't think that the agreement used for the code being written for
the IETF will work (NOSL 3.0), since it is not as broad as described in
this document. (I do sometimes agree with Mr. Rosen.)
But I don't have any trouble allowing the trustees to do their job,
which will include determining what license is appropriate.
Also, I don't see any need to point to specific examples to get at
issues like "royalty free." It is true that to meet the constraints,
and the reality of RFC publication, the IETF license grant will be
royalty free. It's pretty hard to see how a license to permit anyone to
do anything they want with the source code can be restricted by payments
etc.
Remember, the state approach is for this document to state our goal, and
for the trust to achieve what we ask. The goal is not for us to
shoehorn legal text into the outbound document.
Yours,
Joel
Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
Joel M. Halpern wrote:
I do not understand the problem you want addressed. The way this is
worded, it doesn't matter what "open source" or "free software" is or
becomes. The intention is to grant anyone to do anything with the code
segments. That's what we ask the trust to do. Further in line.
I think Simon is suggesting that we provide some guidance to the Trust
in choosing a license. IANAL, however the phrase "grant anyone to do
anything" sounds nice in theory but needs to be translated into a
functioning license. As far as I can see there are three licenses that
would fit the bill:
1. The MIT license
2. A BSD-style license
3. A designation that the code is in the public domain
Some people allege that it is not possible to put a work directly into
the public domain (although I disagree), which is why they prefer to use
a license.
As a point of comparison, the XMPP Standards Foundation recently worked
to make sure that its specifications are safe for inclusion in free
sofware, and decided upon a slightly-modified MIT license (modified in
order to make clear that we were publishing specifications, not code).
The resulting license is here:
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ipr-policy.shtml
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