Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Robert Leif came up with at least one mechanism for compensation in his 
ADCL. I have some reservations about it because of practical 
considerations where I think it might be difficult to get acceptance of 
it from a potential commercial exploiter. But the basic idea is sound.

I could probably come up with fifty ways of handling the licensing if I 
wanted to sit here and type all day. ;-)

Consider this: 90% of everything someone is turning loose out there 
under the GPL has little to no commercial value. At least not enough 
that its worth trying to find someone violating your license and 
prosecuting them. So a license that allows personal/business use but not 
commercial exploitation isn't really a problem, is it?

For the remaining 10% that might have some commercial resale potential 
you merely have to have a mechanism for establishing a suitable license 
and collecting/distributing the fees. You form up a clearinghouse or 
foundation or whatever you want to call it - some organization that is 
going to be responsible for handling this. It has a handful of 
commercial licenses available to a potential buyer and it has some 
algorithm for parceling out the profits to the contributors of any work 
that gets purchased.

Basically, if you released your work under the non-commercial license 
you'd have the option of registering the work with the clearinghouse so 
that one day, if it becomes the next Linux, RedHat comes to the 
clearinghouse and gets a resale license from them. Then you win, RedHat 
wins, the rest of the geek community wins, the clearinghouse wins, 
everybody wins.

MDC

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> 
>  "Not unless you compensate me."
> 
> Well, then, "how much?". "Under what terms?" "For how long?" "Can I
> compete?"  "Can I sell it to 3rd parties? To terrorists? To the
> military?" "Can I modify and redistribute it?"
> 

-- 
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

     "In general the art of government consists in taking as
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     to the other."

         --  Voltaire
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