I don't think it means that.
Rather, what it does is the RfC says "the code must include whatever
license the trust document says.
When the code is produced, that link is dereferenced, the license is
determined, and the license is inserted in the code.
No, no one can reasonably produce code under an unspecified license.
What this does is allow the trust to change, in a forward-going fashion,
what license code produced from the RFC must use. Otherwise, once the
RFC came out, everyone must forever use BSD, even if the community
decided that everyone should henceforth use ABC.
Thus, it is a later binding, but not so late that the code user does not
know what he is committing to when that person produces software using
our code.
Joel
Andrew Sullivan wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 02:19:24PM -0400, Contreras, Jorge wrote:
I also think that Harald's alternate language would work.
Is it a problem that this means that shipping code's license could
change at some time in the future? Are there practical issues to that
if (for instance) the Trust decided to change from BSD to some
copyleft-like license? Note that I'm thinking of shipping, and not
already deployed, code. So one develops based on the BSD-licensed
code, and then the license changes and you ship another instance. Is
this a problem? I'm assuming not, because the original licensee still
has the code under the original terms. But I thought it wouldn't hurt
to ask.
A
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