[ohf-licenses] OHF Obligations for Licensing

[Terry Hancock]

Okay, this is a side subject I need to bring up regarding the proposed OHPL:

What sort of obligations will it place on the Open Hardware Foundation,
and are we okay with those?

I see the OHF as possibly filling the same sort of role w.r.t. the OHPL
as the FSF does with GPL or CC does with By-SA -- what I call the
"license steward".

That will carry certain responsibilities. With the text of the OHPL that
I've posted, these would include:

1) Maintaining a permanent URL for the license. This could be a "deed"
along the lines of the CC license sites, with a link to the full text of
the license, and maybe even CC-compatible RDF code to include. COSTS:
keeping the domain paid up, limits on site layout changes.

2) Accepting recommendations for new Design Domain definitions (and
presumably other kinds of suggestions) for later versions of the
license. COSTS: email address, or maybe a comments form, and someone to
read them.

3) Maintaining a "list of OHF-approved design registries". Note that I
do NOT suggest committing to running a design registry ourselves (though
we might want to try), but rather to maintaining a list of registries
run by other people. We could probably list Open Cores and SourceForge
almost immediately (we'd need to agree on what is the "registry number"
-- though I suspect that for SF that would just be the "project name" +
"release version number"). COSTS: another permanent web page.

If we did decide to run a registry, we'd just list it there along with
the others, but we wouldn't be committed to keeping it open for new entries.

Obviously, I want to minimize the obligations, but I think these are
reasonable. Should we leave it like this?

We may need to specifically disclaim certain obligations (e.g. we are
not a law firm, we can't defend cases for you, go talk to the SFLC for
that, etc.).

Cheers,
Terry



-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com