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MPL nominal charge for source codeMPL nominal charge for source codePosted Jan 7, 2011 14:36 UTC (Fri) by gerv (subscriber, #3376)In reply to: MPL nominal charge for source code by giraffedata Parent article: Mozilla releases a beta of the revised MPL
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nominal :
2. (of a price, consideration, etc.) named as a mere matter of form, being trifling in comparison with the actual value; minimal.
One other way to put it would be "less than the court filing fee of the lawsuit I could file about the fact that your 'nominal' fee is too large to be nominal" :-)
Remember, of course, once one person has the code, they can distribute it for free if they like. And if some company is obstructive, there's no better way of ensuring the first guy to pay the money distributes it loudly and widely at no charge.
Gerv
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MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 7, 2011 16:55 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] 2. (of a price, consideration, etc.) named as a mere matter of form, being trifling in comparison with the actual value; minimal. That's a corollary of the simpler, more fundamental definition I gave ("in name"), and even in this extended form, I don't think that's what the authors had in mind. I don't think they wanted to preserve a distributor's right to claim that he didn't give it away for free -- what would be the point of that?
Remember, of course, once one person has the code, they can distribute it for free if they like. And if some company is obstructive, there's no better way of ensuring the first guy to pay the money distributes it loudly and widely at no charge.Apparently, the authors don't believe that this market force is enough to stop a distributor from requiring a large payment for the source code, or they wouldn't have mentioned a charge at all. So I still think they should come up with a better way than "more than nominal" of describing what kind of charge for source code disqualifies the distributor from the license.
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 8, 2011 7:45 UTC (Sat) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link] So I still think they should come up with a better way than "more than nominal" of describing what kind of charge for source code disqualifies the distributor from the license. Do you have a suggestion? GPL 3 section 6 spent a lot of words on this, but one of the features of the new MPL is brevity.
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 8, 2011 17:38 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Brevity is important but clarity is more important in a license to avoid getting into expensive litigation. Perhaps spending a lot of words is precisely what is needed here.
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 8, 2011 21:15 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Brevity, or perhaps more to the point, simplicity, is a good goal. If it's important enough, I suggest replacing "at no more than a nominal charge" with "at no charge." That's brief, simple, and probably would not make the license much less useful. But if it's important to extend the license to people who charge for source code, then my suggestion would have to depend on what kind of charge the authors had in mind (I'm pretty sure it wasn't a nominal one). If my guess is correct that they want to accomodate charging for the cost of distribution and not for anything else, then I suggest, "for no charge other than the cost of creating and delivering the copy."
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 8, 2011 22:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
so you say that companies must pay for mailing costs, CD costs, etc and cannot charge _anything_ for this?
if you make a license with this restriction, you will find that many companies are not going to be willing to use that license
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 9, 2011 0:26 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] so you say that companies must pay for mailing costs, CD costs, etc and cannot charge _anything_ for this? Well, let's word it more clearly: I say that if companies have to pay for mailing costs, CD costs, etc. when they supply source code and can't charge anything for this, companies will still license code to and from others with MPL. The main reason I believe that is that they can avoid those costs just by distributing the source code on the Internet or including it somehow with the object code. How often does an open source software distributor distribute source code by a separate CD today? However, I suspect that even if a mailed CD is the only way to distribute source code, a company of any size would still not balk at paying for it, because there would be a very small number of requests.
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 10, 2011 3:33 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
Why not simply say "at cost"? That seems more in line with the author's intent: distributors can charge recipients (at most) the actual cost of providing a copy. Or, to give distributors a profit-based motive to point out that source code is available, perhaps something like "up to 5% over cost".
MPL nominal charge for source code Posted Jan 10, 2011 3:43 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] The problem with a simple "at cost" is that that can reasonably be interpreted to include the cost of developing the code. It's probably worth a few extra words to make sure those costs are excluded.
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