Hello, I'm working on a project and have been struggling with finding a license for it. I currently have a very restrictive one (courtesy of my lawyer) but am aware that it very much would limit the interest in further development from the community.
The bulk of the project is in place, and the license is all that is holding back an initial release. There will also be a community aspect where individuals will develop and contribute components, just like every other open source project.... However, some of the contributed components may not be eligible for copyright protections. A component might be a simple configuration file, a pure data set, or even a full description of a server farm with data processing and management software. So what I would like to do is tie the license of the software to the user of the software respecting the licenses of the community-distributed components they use, whether or not the individual component is eligible for copyright protection. I would also like to have a framework where components could require automatic redistribution of modifications---a contributor could select a mandatory/automatic redistribution license. While I understand the desire for someone to remove/disable/firewall off the automatic redistribution functionality for security or other reasons, it would be nice to say "If you disable this part of the system, you are restricted from using contributed components that require this functionality as a condition of your use". At the same time, I am a somewhat concerned about this being viewed as an attempt at DRM or opening the door to DRM-enabled open source software. Does anyone know of an existing license that achieves this? If not what would be a good license to start with? -r _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
