[Tinyos-alliance] Further thoughts on licenses

[Robert Szewczyk]

Hi all 
 
At the closing of our last phone call David pointed out the careful
balancing
act that we have to perform, and suggested that one way to achieve it is
with
a an explicit code of ethics rather than strongly worded and adversarial
license.  There was a question posed in there as to the nature of the
community we are trying to build.   
 
>From my point of view, the thing I desire the most is clarity: I want to
know
what the rules are, and what are the penalties resulting from breaking these
rules.  I want to know what is my legal exposure resulting from
participating
in the community.  I believe that for most commercial companies the main
deal
breaker in adoption is uncertainty; consequently, anything that can be done
to
minimize that uncertainty should be good for adoption.  Code of ethics does
not really accomplish that.  While in principle I am not thrilled by the
negative language, could we come up with an example of an entity whose
participation would be so valuable in the process that we would not choose
not
to enforce the licenses to the letter?  
 
A successful and vibrant community can be build around restrictive licenses,
such as GPL.  GPL contains several clauses that spell out the consequences
of
the license breach and contains several stipulations as to what should
happen
in case of a legal proceedings involving the licensed code.  Despite that
both
open source projects and commercial ventures have grown using that license,
and the communities they involve are creative and productive.  Similarly, it
appears that the Apache license (and project) are supported by a number of
corporations -- Intel and IBM spring to mind.  Consequently I believe that
the
language in the license may have quite a bit of latitude. 
 
My position is that the BSD copyright contains plety of incentives to adopt
the code, but not enough incentives to contribute the code back into the
tree.  My company has determined that Apache license does contain enough
incentives and protections for us to distribute the code.  We added two
additional provisions to the license, but we would be satisfied if the
license
equalled exactly Apache 1.1.   
 
Ultimately, I believe that the best way to lower the barriers to adoption is
to adopt the EXACT language of a small set of mutually compatible open
source
licenses, with the modification that the copyright belongs to the author.
As
a strawman proposal I would put forth New BSD and Apache 1.1.  By sticking
to
exact language of the licenses we ensure that the legal departments of the
various participants will have to deal with well understood (and likely
resolved) issues. 
 
The consensus within the group last time around was that the proposed scheme
was very complex, and complexity is clearly a good thing to avoid.  Would
you
feel that this proposal (Apache or BSD with NesC docs to produce appropriate
documentation) shares the complexity problem of the previous proposal?  I
end
up thinking about concrete examples in use; if this proposal is too complex
could we come up with examples where the burdens presented by Apache and BSD
licenses are too high for someone to adopt TinyOS?  
 
Rob
 
Robert Szewczyk
Moteiv Corporation
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