Re: draft legal ideas

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> Now, I raise this point because 1) no one has tried this approach for
> the package management and glue components that make up a Linux
> distribution (so far as I am aware) and 2) we lost someone interested in
> being involved on the law team becaue they view this as incompatible
> with their desire for a 100% GPL distribution.  I was sorry to see them
> go, but this is an ultimate component of the "pro-business" aspects of
> the distribution - one that I believe can not afford to be ignored.
>=20
> While I hope to see the marketplace shift to a mindset that fully
> accepts open source software licenses, I do not believe that time will
> come soon, and the existance of such opportunities for businesses does
> not mean the foundation will pursue non-GPL licensing terms in any
> cases.  In fact, I will personally work to see that all derived works
> are available under the GPL, excluding as little as possible to meet the
> specific needs of businesses that desire other terms.
>=20

Now I think this really is tricky. Most commercial licenses are binary
distribution licenses. Commercial source licenses I think have the
potential to be a difficult beast to manage. For a start what abilities
are going to be given to the purchaser? Do we allow them to distribute
only binaries that are produced from derived-source?

Do we allow them to offer their customors to *view* the derived-source?
Do we allow them to sell their derived-source?
What do we mean by derived-source in the case of the commercial license?
Will foundation members end up developing closed source extentions to
the GPL code base for customers? What issues could this raise for the
future if/when similar extentsions also appear in the GPL base? *cough*
SCO *cough*. This could also bite Zynot if we do indeed allow our
customers to sell or *show* their derived source to their customers. How
does Zynot protect itself from customers adding patented extensions to
the commercial source that covers basic functionality that we were
*planing* to implement in the GPL codebase because it was an obvious
next feature (for example).

I have to say that I do appreciate where you are coming from here and if
a license exists or can be drafted that enforces the *spirit* of what
you are trying to achieve with a for-payment proprietry version of the
code, then in principle it may be beneficial. I am however very dubious
about this scheme. Also I think if zynot is providing software that
businesses want to leverage then they *will* use our free code given a
lack of choice. If however you *offer* them a choice even by merely
stating another is available then I think many will take the proprietry
road merely because it's what they usually do. There are countless
examples of proprietry software that would *benefit greatly* the vendor
if they distributed it as open source but purly out of inertia and
ignorance they keep it closed.

My vote would be for GPL only (with possible addition of LGPL or GPL +
link exception) and no commercial nonsense. However I am prepared to
look at any propositions people might have for a proprietry license
before making a final decision.

- Galik

--=20
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. "
- Albert Einstein

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