| TYPE | Topic Of Discussion |
| DESCRIPTION | Scott Raney identified the GNU "copyleft" licence, Apple's Darwin license, the Mozilla license, BSD-type license, Perl "Artistic" licence and Public Domain as possibilities for the OpenCard license. Adrian Sutton identified the desire to ensure that OpenCard and it's derivitives stay OpenSource which was generally agreed to by the group as a desirable feature of the licencing agreement. Adrian Sutton mentioned the possible need to register the OpenCard group as an official organisation in order to have the copyright on OpenCard belong to the OpenCard group instead of an individual. M. Uli. Kusterer stated a preference for the GNU Copyleft licence. MP0werd argued against this on the grounds that the GNU licence would require all derivative products (including standalones) to provide source code which makes it unattractive. Anthony DeRobertis suggested GNU GPL for Libraries licence in response to this argument. Andre Spierings suggested releasing OpenCard into the public domain. The main argument against this was that the companies could take the OpenCard source code and sell it. This would also mean that other xTalk companies could take our improvements and add them to their programs, easily keeping pace with OpenCard. Anthony DeRobertis argued that whoever wrote the code should decide what licence that code is released under. M. Uli. Kusterer argued against this stating that a programmer could change the licencing agreement in such a way that the code could not be used in OpenCard, setting back development efforts. Adrian Sutton also pointed out the difficulty in defining who owns the code once numerous patches have been applied to it and also that contributors to the collaboration systems may not want to help someone make a commercial product from which they will receive no benefit. Scott Rayney suggested that the LGPL was a poor choice for a licence for OpenCard as it prohibits standalones from being created and forced developers to inform the user that they can replace the OpenCard engine with another engine. M. Uli. Kusterer suggested that the graphics and icons that will come with OpenCard should be released under a separate licence which restricts their use to OpenCard stacks. During the discussion of this issue it was noted that the OpenCard graphics and icons should be allowed to be used in documentation and reviews as well. Alain Farmer suggested that the licence include a statement that OpenCard cannot be used for illegal or immoral purposes. It was argued that this would be confusing due to the differing laws around the world. Instead it was suggested that the names of the OpenCard developers and development team must not be used to endorse the product and that this should be clear to the user. Rob Cozens posed the question "Who will issue the licence?". There was a number of options proposed including having the licence issued by the authors collectively and forming a legal entity to issue the licence. It was decided that the best option was to form a partnership within the OpenCard collaboration which issued the licence. See Topic Of Discussion "Partnership Agreement". It was noted that OpenCard should not be released with differening licences for differing parts as this would become too confusing. A discussion arose over whether the licence should be issued by one person or collectively by all the authors. It was suggested that the licence be public domain with the name trademarked and this appeared to have the full support of the group. It was decided that this topic should be put to a vote and that vote is yet to occur. Since then, there has been a swing away from public domain licencing as it would allow commercial forks of OpenCard which are undesirable. M. Uli. Kusterer, after discussions with Richard Stallman, suggested using the GPL with a special exception for standalones. The licence proposal can be found at http://freecard.sourceforge.net/fclicens.php3 |
| KEYWORDS | licencing, copyright, copyleft, derivative, public domain, GPL, LGPL |
| RESOLUTION | |
| THREAD | OODL: licensing issues OODL: OODL - Collaboration - Licencing Issue OODL: Who Issues The License? OODL: FreeCard License on the web |