Phil, (01)
I agree with you that open IP is a bigger issue than open source. I
wasn't aware that SRI/Tymshare/McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing had any IP
claims beyond the copyright of the source code and documentation. If
that is the case, then we do have much more work to do. Any ideas on how
we can even determine what kind of IP they might have? (02)
In the short term, free/open source or public domain is very important.
This is because people won't build entire new systems in the short term.
They will want to make improvements on the existing NLS first. It will
need to be available for people to do that first. Only later in the
longer term, will people likely write their own systems from scratch,
based on the ideas in NLS, and then I agree that open source is less
important. (03)
Jonathan (04)
Philip Gust wrote:
> Jonathan,
>
> I agree with your assessment of open source vs. GPL. The other thing
> we'll need to get Boeing to release is any IP claims and patents. If
> momentum ever builds for the system, it's very likely someone will
> produce a new version from current technologies that runs on today's
> platforms. It would be easy to argue that it's not a "derivative work"
> from a GPL standpoint, even though most of documentation needed to
> build a new version is integral to the system itself. It would be much
> harder to work around IP issues unless Boeing addresses that too.
> It would also have the positive effect of blunting IP claims of similar
> systems that came after.
>
> Open IP is an even bigger issue for me open source, since good ideas
> tend to be implemented many times, and implementations tend to
> become commodities over time That's the real fallacy of both GPL
> and proprietary licenses: the tendency to think that an implementation
> is important. In the end, they both tend toward open source over time
> as people produce new implementations to work around the license.
>
> I'll talk with John Toole on Wednesday afternoon and work through
> a plan for approaching Lou Platt at Boeing.
> (05)
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