[Namaste-dev] Re: Weekly Plan June 2 - June 6

[Michelle]

What do you all think of using Creative Commons licensing for the engineering effort? 
http://creativecommons.org/
Bruce, does your dual-license system extend to multisource engineering efforts like this? It would seem to make a lot of sense for a finished product where the definition was under the control of a person or group of people. Do you think it would extend to multisource multi-overlapping-in-time projects with lots of little blocks being worked on all the time in organic parallelism?
The question of how to transition from engineering to manufacturing is something I'm planning for, and anything that would make that transition easier I'm very interested in getting down in writing. Hence, the weekly plan item to start writing a policy.
Every policy has its price, of course. My goal is to produce a light flexible policy that is easy to understand, easy to live with, and easy to enforce. The suggestions made so far have been excellent and I sincerely appreciate your participation in the conversation. 
Would you be willing to share a copy of your license with us so we can learn more about what a working dual license system looks like? 
 
more soon,-Michelle W5NYV



----- Original Message ----
From: Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>
To: Paul Williamson <kb5mu at amsat.org>
Cc: Frank Brickle <brickle at pobox.com>; Michelle <w5nyv at yahoo.com>; namaste-dev <namaste-dev at amsat.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 4, 2008 4:19:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Namaste-dev] Re: Weekly Plan June 2 - June 6

Paul Williamson wrote:
> An open-source policy will be a show stopper for people who can't stand to see others profit from their work.
This isn't necessarily true. I run a dual-licensing system for my own 
business. There is a strong reciprocal license (Affero GPL3) and a 
commercial license. You can use the Open Source license at the cost of 
surrendering any improvements you make with the same rights that you've 
gotten from me, or you can pay for the commercial license. It handily 
sorts out users into those who wish to collaborate and those who just 
want good software and can pay for that. This is certainly possible for 
a project like Namaste, but you'd have to sort out who gets paid for 
what, and that sorting process and the inevitable misallocation would 
likely cause more bad feeling than a "gift" style license. If there were 
commercial potentials and we wanted to avoid the strife, it would be 
better to put funds in a foundation and have the foundation give them 
back to AMSAT.

    Thanks

    Bruce