What is "reasonable" anyway?

Maybe many of the objections raised in this forum could be appeased by a
more precise definition of the meaning of the word "reasonable" in this
particular context. One can easily imagine terms that are "reasonable"
when the licensee is a large corporation, but become prohibitive for
free software developers.

Maybe the W3C could specify that, to be considered reasonable, the
license terms must grant the same rights as royalty-free license, but
may require payment of a fee than cannot exceed a given percentage of
the expected monetary return from the sale of restricted-use licenses of
the resulting program. This way, RAND and RF become equivalent for free
software developers, who release their programs under licenses that make
that specific return equal to zero.

	Federico Heinz

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2001 11:58:40 UTC