Re: custom license (package: bwctl)
Charles,
I'm not a lawyer, but this looks like a one-sided consortium
assignment agreement disquised as a BSD license. It's not
even remotely free software. Let's read the license.
| You are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any
| enhancements to Internet2 or its contributors.
You're not required to send Internet2 your enhancements.
That's definately free, but it could be omitted.
| If you choose to provide your enhancements, or if you choose
| to otherwise publish or distribute your enhancements
Ah. So, what's covered by "providing" enhancements to Internet2
is any sort of publication or distribution.
| in source code form
This one is interesting, I guess they explicitly don't want
to cover binary distributions of your enhancements. So you
can keep those to yourself if you wish.
| without contemporaneously requiring end users to enter into
| a separate written license agreement for such enhancements
Ok. So, this language iss the one under debate I guess.
Simply putting on a license text isn't sufficient, you need
to *require* end users to *enter* into a *written* agreement.
I don't think free software licenses are covered by this clause,
for two reasons. First, anything that requires _assent_ by an
end user has traditionally been seen as non-free. Secondly,
"enter into a written" agreement means that the licensor must
co-sign the agreement, and hence, at the very least be notified
of the licensee's usage. This has also been seen as non-free.
In summary, although you can license your Enhancements to others
without triggering the contribution language, you simply can't
use a free and open source license to do so. This clause is
meant to permit you to use a *non-disclosure* agreement or
some other high-level corp-to-corp sharing agreement.
| then you thereby grant Internet2 and its contributors a
| non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to install, use,
| modify, prepare derivative works, incorporate into the software or
| other computer software, distribute, and sublicense your enhancements
| or derivative works thereof, in binary and source code form.
So, a one-sided copyleft. So, if you publish your derived work, they
can re-license it in any way they wish. However, others can't.
On Sat, Feb 4, 2012, at 09:23 AM, Charles Plessy wrote:
> This license allows to make derivatives under any terms,
> very similarly to the BSD license.
Not any terms, it's absolutely GPL incompatible since your
derivative is bound by this extra clause.
> It makes it impossible to publish derivatives under no terms at all.
No it doesn't. Internet2 simply doesn't care since they can use your
derivatives without restriction no matter what license you use. Unless,
of course, you execute a written agreement with each end-user.
| This restriction is much weaker than copyleft licenses,
This is in no way a copyleft. Copyleft doesn't require assignment
back to the original company, this license effectively does.
> Thefore, while the validity of this concept of default license may be
> questionable, I do not think that it is non-free.
It is absolutely non-free. But wonderfully disguised. It actively
discourages the free publication of course code, by penalizing those
that do so with effective assignment of derivatives to Internet2.
By contrast, it does exactly what the GPL forbids: permits binary
derivative works and encouraging sharing only under under a NDA.
IANAL, TINLA
Best,
Clark
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