Ben Finney wrote:
"Andrés G. Aragoneses" aaragoneses@novell.com writes:
I think it makes more sense for them to embrace a common license, and much better if it's blessed by the FSF, instead of each one adopting a very similar one.
Well, I'm not going to tell anyone not to discuss or ask questions. But I think your chances of getting a new license “blessed by the FSF” are vanishingly small.
These companies that want license terms already had the opportunity to get a blessed-by-the-FSF license: the GPLv3, which was the result of unprecedented input and discussion from the entire software community. I would expect you will have better results encouraging companies to use those well-understood license terms.
If I'm pushing the creation of a new license, it's logical to think that I've already examined the needs of these companies, and the existing licenses don't fit in their corresponding distribution scenarios, even if they're really desiring to switch and start using open source licenses.
(And IMO if the FSF was so close minded to not examine these special cases, licenses such as the AGPL or LGPL would have never been created.)
So, should I start in this mailing-list the discussion and elaborate on the motivations of why this new license is needed and why the existing licenses do not fit with this model? Or should I contact other FSF staff via other means? Any FSF member reading?
Thanks.
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Andrés G. Aragoneses Software Engineer aaragoneses@novell.com
Novell, Inc. http://www.novell.com/ Software for the open enterprise