Consider fixing the license

[JonCruz42]

The GPL is not a good license for sharing a standard with commercial companies. Before much work happens it would be good to switch to something more business friendly like MIT. Especially if a goal is to get other printer manufacturers to incorporate support this would be critical, as a GPL license would almost ensure other companies do not join in supporting it.

[CZDanol]

Hey, right. This has been raised by someone during the reviews, but I totally forgot about it.

Quick AI consultation says however that the MIT license might not be the best one for the job - it's proposing Apache 2.0 or CC0 - where the Apache 2.0 sounds probably better to me because of the protection from patent-locking.

So, how would Apache 2.0 sound? I would of course need to consult it with more people inside the company as well.

[gregsaun]

Isn't Apache license made for code? Here it will be mostly documentation, isn't it? If you want a license that covers everything, doc, software and functional hardware you may consider CERN OHL V2 Permissive. CERN OHL V2 can also restrict patents.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think having patent protection really makes sense here. And if you use a software license for documentation it may make it even more difficult to enforce. Finally, the patenting system is so broken that you can even if this standard would be patented it would not stop others to make a patent with the same prjnciples... A certification process as discussed in #61 would be much more efficient I think and quicker in the event of a license violation.

[CZDanol]

I am no layer myself, I was just parroting what Gemini told me (see https://pastebin.com/1zDA3d93)

I guess I will just leave this question to our legal department.

Thanks for the CERN OHL tip, will check that out.

[Taubin]

I just wanted to say thank you for being open to changing the license and listening to the community on this. Hopefully a good license can be found between the developers, the community and the dreaded lawyers.

[JonCruz42]

I'd suggest either looking at MIT or at the proper Apache one. Definitely take any AI advice with two heavy doses of skepticism. :-)

Looking at similar fields, Apache does seem to come up as friendlier for business/corporate legal departments. And certain projects such as IoTivity are using it. Note that the IoT space has faced many related concerns similar to what this effort will.

Use of Apache licenses has been seen in instances such as Oracle trying to establish more control over its Sun purchases and re-licensing for those business goals. Of course that did end up part of what killed their projects (LibreOffice vs OpenOffice, Jenkins vs Hudson, etc.). Getting community buy-in and not alienating community and customers is probably most important.

[CZDanol]

@Taubin of course :) We really mean it when we say we want to make this an open standard - we just didn't pay the licensing part enough attention.

Okay, I've tried to rřead through the CERN OHL licenses, specifically the W and P ones.

1. The Permissive license gives maybe too much freedom? Anyone could make a copy of the standard, do some changes and release it under a different, even proprietary license, which I feel goes a bit against what we're trying to achieve here.
2. The Weakly reciprocal license feels okay in this sense, but if anyone makes his own SDK to interface with the OPT standard, he would be forced to also release it as open source (so say that someone makes a printer firmware, he would have to keep all the OpenPrintTag stuff in a separate module and then open source the OPT-related module). I like how that plays with the open source spirit, but wouldn't it be a too big of a burden for adoption?

@JonCruz42 WDYM by the "proper apache one"?

[JonCruz42]

I've mainly used GPL, LGPL and MIT most often, so am most familiar with those. You have the Apache License 1.1 license and the Apache License 2.0 license, the latter of which addressed patents. If general adoption is the main consideration the MIT might be better, but when other concerns like patents factor in the Apache 2.0 License might be better. The impact and which licenses can be combined with which other licenses starts to be a consideration.

[gregsaun]

Might be good to talk to OSHWA for the license, I'm sure they have the knowledge to help getting the best license.

[CZDanol]

All right, this has now gone through Jo and has been passed to our lawyer department. Let's see what they come up with.

[yanshay]

Just note it is also possible to have dual license. Most of the rust ecosystem uses that approach of both MIT and Apache. Not sure why they chose it but there's probably a reason to support both. There are probably cases where one would fit vs the other so user can choose which to follow.