MOX Charter comments - Licensing

[William Cox <wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com>]

The work is interesting and broadly applicable; surely a goal of the 
proposers is to have it broadly used?

But there's a confusing combination of RAND licensing terms and the 
repeated statement "Other contributions will be accepted for 
consideration without any prejudice or restrictions and evaluated based 
on technical merit insofar as they conform to this charter." ([Sections 
(1)(b) and (1)(c)]

On the one hand, the output will be on RAND terms (which, BTW, 
encompasses RF with RAND terms - just with zero cost). On the other, you 
call for  contributions, say they will be "accepted for consideration" - 
which seems vague - , and "evaluated". But I don't see "accepted". And 
if you "accept" such contributions, that certainly will affect the RAND 
terms.

Unless, of course, those in at the beginning plan to accept gratis 
contributions from others that will then be licensed back to them.

This does not match most familiar business models -- are  you soliciting 
"free donations"? Will you then license them back at a fee? Who would 
want to participate?

Most confusing. This both limits effective contributions (as "other 
contributions" have no clear path to participating in the licensing 
discussing), and limits adoption (as competing specs will no doubt 
appear if the licensing terms are at all burdensome).

(1)(f) says that the anticipated audience/users are "SOA vendors". 
Again, the licensing appears to make it difficult for open source 
projects to use the planned output of the TC.

Even with RF terms there can issues of distribution, where a burdensome 
license may hinder typical packaging and redistribution, e.g., where an 
RF license requires individual customers to access and accept a license 
before using a product distribution from a third party. But we don't 
know the intended (or even projected) RAND terms.

In short, the combination of intended use, likely audience, and IPR 
terms is problematic, and doesn't make sense to me in its current form. 
This needs to be addressed in the Charter.


bill cox
-- 
William Cox
wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com
+1 862 485 3696 mobile
+1 908 277 3460 fax