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Thank you for following up. If you consider negotiating commercial terms an undesirably adversarial process, I completely understand needing to stick to, say, permissive open terms. There's plenty of murk even in the popular permissive licenses these days. I've written on them in MIT, BSD, Apache, and the GPLs. But those issues are largely ignored by small-shop and solo maintainers, because in their minds, the point is making clear there isn't anything to enforce in the first place. Many choose licenses with attribution requirements and simply don't enforce those, either. You mentioned not wanting to sue people. I can assure that you the vast majority of fully closed-proprietary software companies don't want to sue anyone, either. It's costly, time-consuming, and hardly their specialty. Which is also why, the vast majority of time they have an issue with a customer or would-be customer, it's handled between business people, as a negotiation, rather than by immediately calling in thousands of dollars worth of litigators. Some fear or lawyers is definitely justified. But please don't overestimate how much of all the "legal work" out there lawyers actually do. Self-help is the most popular kind. On the user side, I was saddened to read your comment. We've done a lot of work on Big Time to make it a whole lot more readable for people who aren't lawyers than even terms like Apache 2 or MPLv2. But the issue here is what Big Time says that's new, not whether it expresses familiar terms more clearly. As for "nonstarter", I'd stress that the whole defined concept of "fair commercial license" only matters in the case where you are or become a big company. I hope you'll agree that threshold is more "objective": revenue, headcount, and finance thresholds. The consequence of exceeding one of those limits is that you have to negotiate a separate commercial license. So if there's unpredictability in "fair commercial license" as defined, it bruises only the clear obligation of the developer to offer commercial licenses and negotiate, without gouging. Using roughly the same terms---FRAND terms---that huge corporations accept from other huge corporations when engaged in standard setting. We could have taken another tack, also commonly found in contracts, of requiring the developer to negotiate "in good faith", "reasonably", or both. But that would arguably offer less predictability, if you guess how a court would rule, than the developing FRAND concept. |