On the Eiffel Forum License, v2

Hi Roger,

I've been trying to select an open source license for a debian
package, but it's proving very difficult meeting my requirements for a
license. I've found that the Eiffel Forum License v2 is quite possibly
the closest to my requirements except for a single clause.

So I started to poke around the NICE website, to see how to contribute
feedback on the license, but the site appears to be dormant. Is this
correct? The Yahoo! Groups mailing list also seems to be dormant, and
indeed the only still active place I could find that mentions the
license is teameiffel.blogspot.com, which is why I'm emailing you now
as the listed contact for that site.

It seems that after the OSI proliferation report, there was some talk
of Eiffel deprecating the EFLv2 and using the MIT license instead
(e.g. [1], [2]). I think that, on the contrary, the OSI's
proliferation report was wrong on this account and that the EFLv2 has
some very desirable features that the MIT license does not. I've
discussed these features in the following messages:

* http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/12/msg00110.html
* http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/12/msg00115.html
* http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/12/msg00126.html

But if the Eiffel Forum License is going out of fashion even within
the Eiffel community itself, that would make use of it perhaps less
wise. What is the status of this license: is it still evolving? Is
there still a community to support it? Is there anyone that may find
the requirements that I think EFLv2 meets advantageous? Is there any
chance of NICE creating a license with the clause deletion that I
propose in msg00126.html?

I've CC'd this to www-archive, which is a publically archived mailing
list. You should feel free to remove that from the recipients when you
reply if you want to reply privately, but I would appreciate it if you
would keep it in otherwise so that anyone may refer to this thread.

Thanks,

[1] http://teameiffel.blogspot.com/2006/08/feedback-from-osi-legal-affairs.html
[2] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eiffel-nice-discuss/message/1078

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Monday, 31 December 2007 11:41:45 UTC