[iks-community] IKS Community Agreement for good governance

[Wolfgang Maass]

Hi,

fully agree with Bertrand's distinction between a) and b). We need a  
solution for a) and for b). There might be organizations and companies  
that cannot walk along the OSS path for all software modules, as we  
already heard in Salzburg. So, how can be integrate this software  
without reinventing the wheel every time it gets to using such a Non- 
OSS module? I did that several times already and this is really time  
consuming because every company has its own agreement.

The question is whether we can simplify this within the limits of IKS.  
I hope that we come up with a very simple procedure for case b) -  
hopefully a one-pager is sufficient. The devil is in the details and  
usually appears late.

many greetings

Wolfgang

Am 10.11.2009 um 10:34 schrieb 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
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