Re: Joining the group

And also hello John, Good to have FSF involved in this list directly.

FSF's own transaction req's acknowledged, I hope it won't seem nuts
for me to jump right into a practical license question in addition.

The reason is that a small (also very recently joined) group of
members on this list is working on some software components for a
reference implementation to enable choice of currency amongst parties
to any web-payments or Internet-payments transaction.

Since any implementation would be a web service, if we were creating a
whole solution our own our little team would use the Affero License
v3. However we don't assume that others feel inclined to distribute
their own free/libre whole-solutions under the Affero. On that score
we'd dual license with both GPL3 and Affero. Having said that,
however, normally for reference implementations of a desired standard
I would go with an X-11 license. That's based on the society-wide
advantages of standards getting picked up by all, both free and
restrictive solution creators.

I hope it's okay to jump into a potentially 'exciting' license
question less than 2 hrs after you've joined the list. I expect
there's a wide diversity of views about these matters amongst the
subscribers to this list. But it's quite important to work our license
matters early. I checked the list archives and didn't find this topic
addressed. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/
Will someone please correct me if this has in fact been discussed?

An further discussion ought address "Contibutor Agreements" options
for webpayments source code -- on that topic, here some
just-released-last-week templates from
http://contributoragreements.org/   (Yup, that's a controversial area
too. Sorry!)

FWIW, for context:

• Here's the license section of a free/libre business course syllabus
I recently prepared for a Fortune 500 client:
http://www.projectmanagementhotel.com/projects/course-free-libre-open/wiki#Day-4-FLOW-Business-Risk-38-Value-Management-Licensing-Contracting-Trade-Secrets
   and
• Here's a draft summary of what the small group that I refer to
(above) is up to:
http://www.projectmanagementhotel.com/projects/free-libre-commerce/wiki/Use_Case_%E2%80%93_Price_Stability

Joseph Potvin
The Opman Company

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 6:01 PM, John Sullivan <johns@fsf.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Manu suggested I introduce myself after joining the group.
>
> I'm the executive director at the Free Software Foundation. We are very
> interested in the concept of easy international (micro)payments, because
> we want to facilitate money flowing from free software users to free
> software developers.
>
> In addition to wanting to receive general donations ourselves, we have
> our own (slowly expanding) semi-directed donations program at
> <https://my.fsf.org/donate/working-together/> where people can make
> donations that will help particular project areas, and we are the
> steward over these donations in traditional fashion (so they are
> actually tax-deductible and the expenditures are monitored).
>
> But, we are also working to set up a non-tax-deductible system where
> users can just send money to developers through a trusted system.
>
> For us, any system that we would promote would need to be usable with
> free software. Currently that means we can't use any of the portable
> credit card readers we know about, for example. And it means we shy away
> from promoting some other online payment options because they require
> proprietary JavaScript. We need better ways. :)
>
> Looking forward to the discussions in this group, and contributing what
> I can on behalf of the FSF!
>
> -john
>
> --
> John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
> GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS
>
> Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at
> <http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=8096>.
>

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2013 00:03:25 UTC