Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > This strikes me as oversimplistic. What if a commercial enterprise > wanted to license its IPR in such a way that it put no constraints on > open source, but retained constraints on commercial competitors? I'm > not sure you can get around a technical mandate for some kind of > license and still retain those options. -- Nathaniel Your suspicion is correct. The problem -- which I and others looked for a way around for years, to no avail -- is that there is no bright-line way to separate "commercial" from "noncommercial" activity. All attempts trip over edge cases like this: * A distributor aggregating software to be sold as a CD-ROM anthology for a modest fee. * An engineer using software for development on a project which is not yet software for sale, but intended to be in the future. * Development activity taking place at a for-profit subsidiary of a non-profit association. The open-source community figured out by about 1997-1998 that there is no way to discriminate between "commercial" and "noncommercial" activity that does not create fatal uncertainties about who has what rights at what times. When you add the problems of mixing software with licenses having *different versions* of such a distinction the downside gets even worse. Thus, the licensing guidelines of both the OSI and FSF forbid attempts at this. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf