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Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 11:57:20 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: musl licensing
On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 08:49:39AM -0700, Hugues Bruant wrote:
> >
> > And don't get me wrong, I'm probably one of the biggest enemies of
> > the term "intellectual property" in the open source context; for
> > companies it's another matter, however, we have to play by the
> > rules of the system and be clear about what we mean.
> > For lawyers, calling something "public domain" doesn't mean much
> > to them. So endure the pain, license it under BSD-0, so Google's
> > lawyers and future peoples' lawyers are happy and we actually get
> > shit done.
> >
> Or go the SQLite way and charge a fee to get an explicit license for
> companies that are not comfortable with Public Domain
>
> http://sqlite.org/copyright.html
I've asked that we try to stay on-topic. The topic is not relicensing
or new licensing models (and certainly not unbalanced ones), only
fixing the issues that are making Google's lawyers go into paranoid
mode. :-)
> That's probably much stronger than the musl community would be comfortable
> with and also too late as it would require all past contributors to
> disclaim copyright, not just Rich but it's worth noting that public domain
> ideology is not incompatible with corporate use.
I don't think this is entirely accurate because there's plenty of
legacy PD code that made it into products with major corporate use. It
would take some research to produce a list but I'm quite confident
it's there. So the issue is not that "PD is incompatible with
corporate use" but (from what I can tell) that corporate lawyers are
weary (possibly rightfully so) of new attempts to put things in the
public domain without a clear license from the people who would be
copyright holders if the material is actually covered by copyright in
some or all jurisdictions.
I really don't want to be the "new DJB" who's holding out on actually
giving proper permissions statements/license as an act of protest
(against what?) and I'm hopeful that we can find a nice approach that
makes both parties happy.
Rich
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