Incentives

[yeqbfgxjiq]

The HCL is super cool, but only if people actually follow through on it. ATM the legal fees to enforce such a license would often not be worth the hassle. As we all know open source projects are broke. Therefor, while it's important to draft a solid license from a legal perspective, it's also important to create other incentives for projects and businesses to participate. This can include, but not be limited to

• [ ] social rewards and status games (shun the non believers)
• [ ] implementing Charity Through Marginal Price Discrimination to give businesses that contribute back to HCL projects a discount on other things
• [ ] sheer awesomeness (create hype and excitement around the project so people participate irrationally because it's fun and they want to)

[lkngtn]

Regarding the legal fees, the license could have a penalty associated with non-compliance which could be rewarded to the attorney who supports the case. So attorneys could take cases on contingency. We don't necessarily need to make the assumption that an open source project will need to personally pay to enforce the license.

And often with a good legal case, the threat of legal action is sufficient to reach a mutually beneficial settlement. :)

[yeqbfgxjiq]

That sounds awesome. I like the idea of baking contingency compensation in as the default. Would be even more powerful if there was a database of on call lawyers (is that what openlaw is?) that the HCL registry could plug into and call on if need be