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July 20, 2005
Good informal lunch meeting today
We had an informal lunch get together today. The consensus is that it went well. The attendees were: Dan Bricklin, Ralph Katz (consultant), Peter Moldave (lawyer, Gesmer Updegrove), Scott Peterson (corporate counsel, Hewlett-Packard), and David Rickerby (lawyer, Choate Hall & Stewart).
We discussed lots of legal and business model stuff about the GPL. What came out of it (as suggested by Scott Peterson) was a desire to help developers add the "Here's how I define the unclear areas of the GPL with regards to MY product" side-language to their product's licensing information. This could be noting the areas where there may be questions (e.g., how are the plug-ins to THIS product treated with regards to the GPL reciprocal licensing) and sample wordings for different answers to the questions. This isn't trying to "weasel out" of the GPL. Scott: "We want to do what you want us to do. Just tell me what it is!" The problem is that it is often too unclear and that is holding back adoption of Open Source software. David Rickerby volunteered to start as the point person on moving ahead with this (drickerby at choate dot com).
Posted by danb at July 20, 2005 04:11 PM