Best-effort castration of both copyright and copyleft
To develop a simple set of software development agreements which promote open-source but without the "poison pill" of so-called copyleft licenses such as the GPL.
Copyneuter will not itself be a software license, but a practical agreement to establish in advance permissive licenses which will automatically apply to content/code created for a new project, such as between a customer and a software development vendor or subcontractor.
The reason this is needed at all is because of copyright law which establishes onerous default powers to authors, even when someone else is paying them to create the content. This is a problem which needs to be addressed. The goal of Copyneuter is simply to fix this in a manner which is equally fair to all parties.
General terms:
- Copyright on the content remains with the original vendor/author
- ...but is automatically licensed to the customer under a permissive license such as MIT/BSD/Artistic
- Vendor/customer are free to decide on a case-by-case basis if the license
will be exclusive to the customer or public/open-source. The default
should be exclusive, however, there should be a simple mechanism to make
open-source:
- The customer may declare it should be open-source (which should already be implied by their permissive license)
- The vendor declaring in advance their intent to open-source a specific component and the customer not refusing when given a reasonable opportunity to do so.
- For all derived works, included libraries, etc, for which the vendor is not the copyright holder, whatever is the most permissive license granted to the vendor shall be passed on to the customer
The idea is that this agreement can be used to avoid the silly and time-consuming negotiation which is created simply by the vacuum created by having no agreement at all. From the standpoint of the vendor, no agreement is already slanted in their favor, but this will create the need for the customer to propose an agreement which, if they realize the copyright issue in the first place, is likely to be just as onerously slanted in the other direction (al a iTunes Terms and Conditions). The goal is to stop the lawyers before they ever get involved. The vendor can mitigate the high transaction cost by just proactively agreeing to be reasonable.
This is still just preliminary brainstorming... comments/feedback welcome