MAA: > Yes. I want to sell to commercial users and give away to others. That > is incompatible with clause 6 of the OSD. Mark Murphy: > For example, if what you are looking to release is a mature > technology with an identifiable user base, you may be in fine shape > with a not-quite-open-source license, if that user base will value > your new licensing terms over what they have today.
Which is a wonderful idea. However, to my knowledge no generally accepted license exists for that today. Especially, if one wants: > the *exact* same code base to be commercially licensed and > simultaneously available in source form for the public. The closest approximation I'm aware of is "sell the present, free the past". It's not a bad model. However, some of us would like to truly give our current code away in a truly open source form and still sell it. I myself am dealing with exactly that conundrum. <section which is a side-detal that belongs here extracted to below> Some of the options we have considered are giving away older versions (the is a nice version of my software ca. 1996 that represents a nice complete thought and which could be easily open sourced, except for the fact that there are bugs in that version that are fixed in the current version, and the bugs are mixed in with enhancements, and how much effort do we want to go to for something we are giving away and intend to make no profit on???) or giving away "stripped down versions" (if we take the effort to port the current fixes to the 96 version but leave out the features, it is a version that is essentially a stripped down copy of our current code). Many companies do something similar to this by publishing gratis versions for non-commercial use, but, then those versions aren't really open source. And one can't incorporate parts of those releases in open source software. None of these options are as satisfying as finding a way to give away our current version and still retaining our rights. It is probably not possible. However, from all the efforts of commercial/proprietary software businesses to do so, you can see that it is an ideal to strive for. And despite the apprehensions of some members of this list, assuming that the only reason to want to do so, is to hijack the open source concept for commercial gain, there are propretary software vendors out there who wish to make their software more open source, one small step at a time, not for any self-serving reason, but simply because it has the "right" feel. However, some of us truly believe in "intellectual property" (that software is the fruit of our own hard work) and that our right to receive "just compensation" is another ideal which cannot be sacrificed in the process. <from above:> In particular, I have clients to whom I have sold proprietary copies to. I would be perfectly happy if those clients could use that software to create open source works that they distribute (with no forther royalties--our current software requires no royalties for distributing derived works). However, I don't want some non-client coming along and benefiting from the technology we have created and creating a propietary work without compensating us--once we are compensated we don't care. It is just the point of creating the derived work where we want and expect compensation. And, to tie this to the previous thread, that is why I was interested in the license that Abe Kornalis (I hope I spelled it correctly this time, I delete past postings so I can't be certain). Our mental model of where software has value is at the ability to create dervied works. Distribution does not interest us. You want to make billions of copies and give them to every person on the earth, go ahead. However, if they use our mental effort to save them mental effort, we would like an appropriate fee. Once we have been paid our fee, we don't care whether you as client charge further downstream fees or not, nor whether you give away source or not. That's our point of view. However, in the real world our license doesn't work that way, and unfortunately we haven't found a way to make it work the way we would like. Our default license does not allow our clients to distribute our sources as the part of their application, because if we did then we would loose our legal protection. We have to make point-by-point exceptions for the redistribution to keep things tidy legally. That's a real nuisance. Better for us would be a license that was closer to open source (or better yet truly open source) that recognized that derived works were still a right that as the original copyright owners we retained. Such a license would allow us to allow our customers to bundle our sources with their products and give them away, because they would not have given away our rights in our sources. The recipients of those copies would then be free to use the software as they saw fit (except for making new derived works using our parts, as that is still our right). I think a license that would do that is possible. Appearantly the QT license keeps the integrity of the original work whole in redistributions (i.e. modifications are made by patches and the whole is kept exact in derived works), the MPL applies the license only on a file-by-file basis, and the AFL allows the combining into a derived work where the licesne of the part need not apply to the whole (but hopefully remains on the relevant parts). The must-publish or must-supply clauses seems to describe acceptable conditions for considering the result to be opn source and under which we would allow our software to be used without further fee. However, I am not a lawyer and I'm not likely to hire a lawyer to write such a license unless I have good reason to believe that such a license could and would be OSI certified. (The last time I hired a lawyer it cost us $25k to get a simple lease resolved and the results were not entirely satisfactory.) Now, if you'll excuse me, I have programming to get back to (actually today system administration and bookkeeping, joy of joys).... -Chris Clark -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3