Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Grant Griffin]

Pat McCann wrote:

> 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).

Point taken, but frankly, the Internet offers those of us who take (almost) complete
anonymity.

To carry that a step further, although one has little chance of selling a GPL'ed
_system_ like Linux without meeting its terms, it really wouldn't be that hard to put
in somebody's little GPL'ed module into a larger black-box system, and nobody would
ever know; therefore, only honesty (and possibly some fear of "whistle-blowing"
employees) prevents it.

> 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.

It definitely is not!  Iowegian is about as small as a corporation can get <hint>.  We
have no lawyers.   (Actually, we _do_ have one, but as Tim had suggested, we Little
Corporations can't afford to ask our lawyers any questions).

We intend to be team players wrt open-source software, but to this day, we have never
incorporated any free source code into our products; we have created it entirely
ourselves, and, in one case, licensed something for a fee from somebody.  So the
concept doesn't apply.

It might have, though.  Our ScopeFIR product uses a well-known (in DSP) algorithm
called the "Parks-McClellan" algorithm, which was originally written in FORTRAN, and
published in journals.  When ScopeFIR was being written, I considered using a very
nice C translation of it which was GPL'ed.  However, from a business perspective, it
turned out to be better for me to simply re-translate the FORTRAN into C myself (which
only took about two days).  At the source code level, the other GPL'ed C translation
was much cleaner than what I ended up with, but both work equally well.  Several years
later, the author of the GPL'ed one subsequently removed the GPL license from it,
making it truly "free".  That was great, but at this point, so many copies of my
translation have been shipped that I have developed a lot of confidence in it.  So I
didn't change over to his.

I could release my version of the Parks-McClellan at this point (and still might
someday), but that basically that seems redundant, given that a better one (at the
source code level) that is now truly free is already out there .

=g2
--
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
Publisher of dspGuru                           http://www.dspguru.com
Iowegian International Corporation       http://www.iowegian.com