[9fans] inferno licence terms

[Richard Uhtenwoldt ru@ohio.river.org]

Mr Forsyth,

although the GPL is a complex document enforced by an even more complex
legal system, the social goal that the document (and indeed the FSF as a
whole) strives to achieve can be stated in a few paragraphs.  the fact
that it has a clearly stated goal that has never changed since Stallman
wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1984 is a big reason for the GPL's success.
the standard proprietary licenses have this same property that they are
complex but have a simple summary that most users understand ("dont copy
that floppy"; software is really no different from a novel or a music
recording).

you have evidently decided that a proprietary license or the GPL or
another strictly Open-Source license will not meet your needs.
nevertheless, it would be advantageous to adopt a license that, though
complex, has a short and sweet "story", expressed in terms of social
goals or ethical principles, to tell the average user.  almost more
important than legality is winning the hearts and minds of non-experts
in the law with the "story" behind your license.  for example, the GPL
has never been tested in court, but by this time it has so much hold
over so many hearts and minds that it is a compelling reality that
courts simply must reckon with.

even better would be a "story" that others have already been "telling"
for many years now, so that some people are already familiar with the
story.  Ted Nelson's "transcopyright" idea is one such story.

although Nelson chose an unwise implementation strategy in which it was
not permitted for a user to keep a persistent copy of a
"transcopyrighted" work on his own hard drive and although it was
intented to cover prose, not code, Ted Nelson's "transcopyright" story
seems very suitable to your needs as I understand them so far.

Nelson explains transcopyright here:
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/transcopyright/transcopy.html

here are the 2 salients points, or principles, to Nelson's "story".  he
actually includes other points --that authors must be credited and that
the original work must be readily available to anyone perusing an
amended version-- that I do not consider necessary for our purposes.

principle 1: it is okay for the owner (copyright holder) of a software
to use the legal system to demmand payment for the right to "enjoy" the
software.  creating multiple tiers of enjoyers/users with different
privileges is expressly okay.

the moral justification for this demmand for payment is that to a
first-order approximation, the person or firm who does not pay and is
consequently coerced by the legal system into not being able to enjoy
the software is no worse off than if the software never existed.  there
are second-order effects, such as when essential documents whose
creation was paid for by taxes are available only in proprietary
formats, or when most employers standardize on the dominant office
suite, but I argue below that most of these second-order effects go away
when what I call "captive" software goes away.  what minor insults to
liberty that remain are outweighed by the benefits that accrue because
creators have a way to recoup the costs of their creative efforts.

principle 2: it is bad for software to have a "captor".  roughly
speaking, a captor has a monopoly on the right to distribute amended
versions of the software.  one way to keep software captive is to keep
its source code a trade secret.  even when the source code is available,
however, the software is captive unless a large number of parties enjoys
the legal right to distribute amended copies of the software to all
legitimate users of the original software.

eg, if users of Microsoft's software were not dependent on Microsoft for
upgrades and bugfixes but rather could get upgraded/bugfixed/amended
versions of the software from a wide range of suppliers, Microsoft could
not abuse its userbase the way they have done.

your proposed license in which every upper-tier user enjoys the right to
distribute amended source code to every other upper-tier user and
binaries thereof to anyone at all qualifies Inferno as non-captive
software.  moreover, all Open-Source software is non-captive software.

let me know if I can clarify any of this or explain why I think software
with this particular "licensing story" behind it will be successful.