[iks-community] IKS Community Agreement for good governance

[Bertrand Delacretaz]

Hi,

Didn't have time to read all of the proposed agreement yet, just one
quick (but important IMHO) comment on Wolfgang's comments.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Wolfgang Maass <wolfgang.maass at unisg.ch> wrote:

> ...Copyrights or patents? I suggest that we keep both issues separated. Sharing
> of "patent issues" should be easy for all research partners, i.e., research
> partners should not be limited by patents during the project and thereafter.
> This might be different for sharing patents between commercial partners.
> Copyright is different and probably less complicated. ...

> ...Furthermore I suggest that we make public to all IKS partners who is sharing
> which patents with whom...

> ...we will also know which software must be replaced for IKS
> solutions under OSS/Free license agreements....

> ...We also need a procedure for setting up such patent sharing agreements incl.
> documentation, signing and arbitration services....

All this sounds very scary and complicated for a small company looking
at using IKS stuff...

A very simple and effective way of separating which IKS components

a) are fully open source, no strings attached

or

b) require legal scrutiny before use

Would be to work on components which fit into the a) category on a
neutral ground...and you see me coming I guess, the Apache Software
Foundation is without a doubt one of the best such neutral grounds -
as exemplified by the Apache HTTP server project, Hadoop, Tomcat,
CMIS, Subversion and many others.

This fully resonates with my proposal (coming up later this week at
the workshop, based on [1]) to incubate as much as possible of the IKS
infrastructure at Apache. All of what I'm suggesting there fits in the
a) category, it's no rocket science, just a state of the art modular
RESTful framework.

Let's create a framework for an IKS semantic engine there, with APIs
for plugins that do the actual complicated work, so that community
members who want to create non-open source or patent-encumbered
modules can do so, with a clear separation between those and the
common parts. Apache does not allow any exceptions to its license for
software that it distributes, so the IKS components developed there
are clearly usable by anyone who accepts the Apache License.

My hope is that most useful modules would fit in the a) category (and
thus could live at Apache as well), but if some don't, having them
live under a different umbrella would make that very clear. And of
course, working in a modular way allows non-IKS people to provide
additional modules, which is also a big plus.

My 2 swiss centimes...I don't mean that the suggested agreement is not
needed, but asking potential users to fully understand is way too much
for small shops.

-Bertrand

[1] http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/main/iks-pragmatic-view.html