Co-op Source License Terms and Conditions

[kahunamoore]

All,

The Co-op Source License is being drafted and we want to open up a discussion of what terms and conditions you would like to see included or excluded from it.

One goal of the license is to keep it as simple as possible - this may require more than one license if a single license cannot fit the needs of all members. Another goal is to make code freely shared within the cooperative so having a single common license would encourage this.

For a quick summary of existing Open Source licenses, see:

http://choosealicense.com/licenses/

The software licenses listed there contain grants or restrictions of various terms and conditions. Below are our (current) take on how they apply to the Co-op Source license:

License and copyright notice - required

State Changes - required

Commercial Use - permitted

Distribution (forking) - permitted, discouraged (fee?)

Modification (patches) - required, pay-for-patches

Patent Grant - patents are messy... undecided

Private Use - permitted

Sub-licensing - forbidden

Hold Liable - forbidden

Use Trademark - forbidden

Disclose Source - required

Library Usage - permitted

To these we include an additional condition:

Membership - in order to be granted any of the above terms and conditions one must be a member of the cooperative. This key provision provides the money that allows the cooperative to fund operations and provide benefits to the membership as well as providing income for individual projects. As with many cooperatives, at the end of the year all profits are redistributed back to the membership.

If all users of the software are required to pay membership dues then there exists an income stream from which projects derive revenue. In return for hosting a project with the cooperative, projects are provided hosting services, code, patches, documentation, testing and contributions from other members/developers. "Stronger together" as they say.

We see membership dues being somewhere between $35 - $100 per year. Given enough members, this could provide a substantial income stream from which to fund developers and new projects. Of course this is a matter of providing sufficient value up front in order to attract members, a chicken and egg problem. However, with some sweat equity and key projects we should be able to bootstrap the cooperative without incurring any debt or outside obligations (e.g. VC funding.)

Of the above terms, which ones are most important to you? Which ones absolutely must be required, permitted and/or forbidden?

We would love to hear what you think.

Alan

P.S. For those who are interested in more restrictive licenses, there is a related project working to define a software license called the Closed Source license. More on this later...

[Alan Moore]

Update: I've been working of this. I have been needing to put out a strawman version for a very long time. Time to put up or shut up... The new update will be more fleshed out than what I posted here and will include accompanying explanations as to how the various clauses support our goals, as I currently understand them.

I'm too tired tonight, maybe tomorrow. Stay posted.

Alan

[Bill Glover]

> too tired tonight

I totally get you there. I was up until 2:00am working my latest side project. It's a good tired though. 

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