[OpenLayers-Dev] MOTION: simplified license

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

We've had discussions previously about adopting a license that has
more widespread use than our modified BSD license.  The motivation for
making a change is increase the likelihood that others can use
OpenLayers without having to direct specific licensing questions to a
very small pool of people (perhaps a pool of one).

The 2-clause BSD, referred to as "Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD
License" looks good to me
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause).

This license differs from our current license
(http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers/license.txt) in a number
of ways:

1) The 2-clause license omits the non-endorsement clause.  Our current
license says that nobody can use the OpenLayers name to endorse
products that use OpenLayers without specific written permission.  To
my knowledge, we have given specific written permission once.  There
are enough other uses of the OpenLayers name in promoting software
that uses OpenLayers that I think we are not going to enforce this
non-endorsement clause.

2) The 2-clause license doesn't contain any language about patent
rights.  Our current language about patent rights is not included in
other common forms of the BSD (OpenLayers and FeatureServer are the
two uses I could quickly find).  Removing this specific language would
align our license with licenses used by many other projects - reducing
the chance of licensing questions that are specific to our project.

I'm open to hearing proposals to use another license.

I'm +1 on changing to the 2-clause BSD.

Tim

-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.