Sublicensing
Stephen Pair
stephen at pairhome.net
Tue Aug 19 19:00:27 UTC 2003
Alan Kay wrote:
> As I said once before: at this point, we need better lines of code
> more than better lines of license! However, I think there are a few
> things in SqueakL -- the Apple license (the only one that obtains in
> my opinion) -- that could be removed to make it smaller and simpler,
> and this might be possible to do.
I think a simplified license would be a good thing...particularly if it
will make it acceptable to those entities that have taken it upon
themselves to bless licenses as "open source" (as I understand it,
SqueakL doesn't pass muster with them). The other thing I wouldn't mind
is if there was some entity (i.e. SqF) that did a little more to ensure
that we (as contributors) have agreed to the terms of the Squeak
community when submitting code for inclusion within Squeak (and
optionally for code distributed separately). Specifically, we would all
grant SqF the right to redistribute and sublicense our contributions
without restriction. The Apache foundation has something like this:
http://incubator.apache.org/forms/ASF_Contributor_License_2_form.pdf
There are entities (ahem...companies) that will reject open source
software out of hand...nothing to be done about those entities. But,
there are others that want any open source that they use to meet certain
criteria wrt IP...such as ownership rights being clearly understood and
the license not having bizarre use restrictions (i.e. GPL). For those
companies, the most important thing may be that there is some entity
that assumes the responsibility (and perhaps even the liability) of
ensuring (and assuring) that the software they distribute is free from
IP related legal entanglements.
While I can say that I personally am not really concerned about such
companies, I can say that I wouldn't mind there being such a framework
for contributions in place for the Squeak community. Such a framework
would also be useful for various sub-projects related to Squeak, but not
part of Squeak itself per se (also very much like the various Apache
sub-projects).
- Stephen
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