[ba-ohs-talk] Licensing and Permission to Use
The licensing topic is vast and evolving, and we are at the very
beginning. This update serves to let everyone know where we are starting
from. Jack Park pretty well summed it up in his post on May 31, 2002 to
the ba-ohs-talk list, (relevant paragraph reproduced below). Below
Jack's post is an update.
It seems more than appropriate at this time to express, on behalf of the
CPC, our gratitude to Eugene Eric Kim for his invaluable contribution to
the formation and emergence of the fledgling CPC in many areas, not
least of which is his thought leadership, deep expertise and guidance in
the evolving field of open source licensing and free software. (01)
Jack Park "On licensing, Eugene Kim articulated a position
http://www.eekim.com/ohs/attic/whybsd.html that, to the best of my
recollection, serves as a valuable interpretation of the discussions a
group here in the Silicon Valley, which included the Doug himself, had.
My recollections (which, btw, are subject to senior moments) tell me
that we decided that something akin to the Apache
(http://www.apache.org) license was more than sufficient, though there
has been some added discussions about the incorporation of additional
legal matter that would try to prevent users of the OHS license from
obtaining patents that could block the evolution of OHS in any
direction. Doug's vision, at least my interpretation of it, is that OHS
should be completely free to evolve in any direction necessary to serve
those needs of humanity for which it is created." (02)
Mei Lin Fung 5/31/2002
A. Licensing (03)
On September 27, 2001, at the 6th meeting of the Bootstrap Core Planning
Committee(CPC) the CPC records show the following resolution be
accepted. (The resolution was originally recorded in the minutes for the
5th meeting Sept 13 and revised at the 6th meeting. The resolution is
recorded as accepted in the Minutes for the 6th meeting, and distributed
to the CPC in the agenda and minutes for the 7th meeting October 4,
2001.) (04)
Resolved and Accepted:
Bootstrap will adopt the Apache foundation open source license for all
our projects. We will review this decision in 6 months. Karen Robbins
will provide statement for our website and our standard response. (05)
B. Permission to Use clarification (06)
The CPC resolved 5/30/02 to communicate to the unrev and ohs lists: (07)
B.1 The Bootstrap Alliance (BA) is the sole host of the ba-ohs-talk list
and the ba-unrev-talk list and encourages participation in the list
discussions. (08)
BA wishes to clarify that the ba-unrev-talk discussion list and the
ba-ohs-talk discussion list are not formally connected to the Colloquium
on the Unfinished Revolution, co-sponsored by Stanford University,2000.
Presenters in the Colloquium were asked to sign a document, called
Permission to Use. The Permission to Use does not apply to BA activities
and in no way governs interactions on either the ba-unrev-talk and
ba-ohs-talk lists. (09)
BA understands that some ba-unrev-talk and ba-ohs-talk participants
would like for BA to announce the intellectual property policy that
applies to list interactions. BA is developing a policy statement that
is aligned with the principles of Bootstrapping, articulated by Dr.
Douglas Engelbart. A policy is under development and will be posted in
the near future. (010)