Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Pat McCann]

Grant Griffin <g2 at seebelow.org> writes:

> Strangely, this VTA implementation (call it "Implementation #1") was marked as
> being copyright by the author, and GPL'd--even though the author had very likely
> written it on his employer's time, and therefore probably did not own the
> copyright--and therefore probably did not have any legal basis to set licensing
> terms (of any kind) on it.

I suspect this happens very often.  Like some important parts of the Linux
kernel, I suspect, but cannot prove (without a lawsuit).  And with non-GPL 
open source too.  Which is why many companies won't mess with it.

> After having done that--and after having made a few improvements of my own, mine
> ("Implementation 4") was now the best of all.  Now, in an ideal world, #4 would
> be "returned to the pool" under the "don't sue me" terms of #2.  However, in The
> Big Corporation, there isn't really any good mechanism to do that, and, besides,
> The Corporate Lawyers would probably stop us: they would see the legal risks as
> outweighing the benefits.  (By nature, lawyers aren't "team players". ;-)

But remember that many members of the open software community (copyleft
and not) will get mad or at least feel badly towards you if you receive
without giving, especially with, as you explained, a general-purpose VTA
(or your improvements).  You and I don't force people to play nicely
with us (like GPL), but we would like them to, especially if it is not
very costly.  Your Big Corp. was not playing nicely just to save a very 
small (to them) licensing risk.  (This is a reason we need a very free 
license that is well known to be "lawyer proof".  Maybe Python's is
close to that.)

You might want to tell us that Iowegian International Corporation 
is not Big Corporation.