glenbraun
commented
6 years ago There three reasons that I have the disclaimer in the license right now.
One is practical. I don't have an accounting system or processes to capture the value of contributions or to ask for and receive licensing fees. There's no legal entity for the license project itself, so I don't know how it should take money or accept liabilities. Until these things are figured out, I don't feel the license project is on a firm enough footing to be viable. That said, this is GitHub and lots of people can copy and use quite freely. I expect people who might take this idea and use it to consider, as the license now states, the contributions made to this project, that is, to respect the terms of the license. But, I have no formal mechanism in place to express those requirements.
Second, is that this system sort-of depends on smart contracts and there have been no smart contracts written for the project yet. This means there's no automated revenue stream where people call a smart contract which includes the logic to share the revenue with the contributors. Certainly, a general license which doesn't depend on smart contracts, which would use the trust in the individual or organization to honestly account for any revenue and share it as agreed, could be possible, but the main idea of this license is that people who adopt it are trusting in the incorruptible nature of smart contracts to capture and execute the revenue sharing agreement.
Finally, there are many open legal questions in my mind and the contract has not had any legal review.
Some of these legal questions are:
- Would the license stand up in court? US court? International? What's missing before it would be a legal license.
- How would the court see the entities participating in the project? Sole proprietors? Is this a good model? Would an LLC be better? What forms by country are best?
- It's a cooperative license. Is a coop structure the right thing from the beginning? How is that set up? Are there bylaws which can simply be adopted? What are the non-US coop structures like and how would/should these be used?
- What accounting practices are legally recognized for this type of organization?
- How about taxes? 1099?
- Is employment law a factor?
- What about product liability?
- What processes must be in place to insure that contributors are submitting their own work and there are no intellectual property issues?
It's my hope that there can be some workable defaults for these questions AND that these can be coded into smart contracts. That is, things like meeting 1099 requirements, accounting, capturing signatures, identity, etc. All these concepts are being considered in the blockchain, smart contract space. As they evolve they would be incorporated into solutions which use the license.
I'm wondering why you felt the need to include this, and if it can point to any bugs in the current way of thinking about this license.
Is it because you don't want to charge for the use of this license / have ethical values in defining potential revenue streams?
Is it because the ideas aren't developed enough to take on this accountability? It seems like there are a certain number of "good faith" style agreements required by this license. Maybe here would be a good place to hammer out the structure of one of those?