[legal] Discussion Postponed / Moved / Considered Harmful

[Leo Simons <ma...@leosimons.com>]

Hi gang,

All these licensing threads started when I posted a FAQ of what I
believed to be the current legal situation. A main goal of a FAQ is usually
to *reduce* mail traffic about the stuff in the FAQ. Guess what, I failed!

Its really important this group starts focussing on building some cool
stuff. Licensing and policies do not count as cool.

So, here's a policy proposed and accepted by lazy consensus (or so I hope):

 * people with legal questions about harmony go read the legal FAQ
 * people with legal questions not answered by the legal FAQ can ask
   them here
 * if there is no ready-made answer, discussion surrounding what the
   answer should immediately be moved "elsewhere", where elsewhere
   might be determined from

   * your legal counsel. Obviously.
   * See http://www.apache.org/licenses/
     apache-committer-only mailing list: legal-discuss at apache dot org
     (don't email these people, they're busy!)
   * http://www.fsf.org/licensing/
     gpl compliance address: licensing at fsf dot org
     (don't email these people, they're busy!)
   * http://gplv3.fsf.org/
     for everything related to gplv3
   * http://www.softwarefreedom.org/index.html
     for, well, any law stuff relating to software freedom

   Note the FAQ already mentions a bunch of things for which there is no
   answer yet. Asking the question again won't suddenly result in an
   answer.

- Leo
--

PS: After some further discussion with Mark and others, I've also set up

  http://groups.google.com/group/legal-bridges/about

which has one purpose and one purpose only -- to figure out legal /
licensing bridge possibilities between the free software and apache 
licensed worlds that have nothing to do with the GPLv3 process (eg,
assuming that GPLv3 and Apache License become compatible, what we do
*before* that happens). The result of that work will at some point 
rickle down the layers of all the different organisations and be noted
here.

The goal for that group is that its a little more public than
legal-discuss @ apache, a little more neutral, and has Less Traffic
On It.

Mark's idea was that we get just a few people from all the different
groups together to work on this, so I'd very much encourage everybody
*not* to subscribe to that list and instead get on with writing code!

However, it ain't public (I wanted public) if you don't tell anyone.
So there.