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Vision
As promised previously, the Steering Committee would like to share our thoughts
on licensing goals. We think it’s important that any license, copyright,
trademark, trade dress or other legal construction be done in the spirit of the
overall organization goals. From the
bylaws, the organization goals are as follows:
- maintain and distribute the core LDraw properties, the file format and parts library, as free and extendable resources for everyone’s benefit, in the spirit of James Jessiman; and
- develop and maintain the LDraw format; and
- foster communication among people interested in virtual LEGO(r) building, and
- promote the virtual LEGO hobby through online resources, events, media exposure, literature, etc; and
- support developers of new and innovative LDraw software; and
- represent the interests of the LDraw/virtual LEGO builders’ community to The LEGO Company, LEGO fan organizations, clubs, educators, organizers of special events, the CAD industry, and the like; and
- adapt and respond to other existing and potential future LEGO CAD formats, whether fan developed, existing CAD formats, or formats released by The LEGO Company.
It is pretty clear to us that good licenses can aid us in achieving these goals,
while not so good ones will hinder us.
Other material for Review
By now hopefully folks have had a chance to do some reading of the various
threads cited here
While there are a number of great posts in the threads, one we think is
particularly germane is this post, which is Steve’s most recent (we believe)
license draft. See also Steve’s reply
to Jacob’s reply to that, about grepping author names/contact. We think that
draft should be evaluated as a potential starting point for a draft, as it is
worded nicely, without too much legalese. It does need to be measured against
the goals of licensing.
Goals
With that said we think the following goals make sense. (some of this is
recapitulation of what has went before, in fact we expect people to agree with
these goals as reasonable ones, although we welcome comment, but we think it’s
important to have a succinct but complete statement of goals to measure license
texts against)
High Level goals
- The library itself should always be open source. We don’t want a secret format or secret parts.
- Authors should be incented to contribute parts. Since contribution is a voluntary act, that means the license should make it desirable, and easy, to contribute. However LDraw should be able to do what needs to be done with the parts that constitute the library.
- Users of the library should be incented to do whatever wonderful things they can dream up. The license that a user gets ought to be as broad as possible, with little or no restriction on what can be done. However it should protect the rights of the authors that submitted the parts.
Author specific goals
- The license that authors use to grant LDraw rights should not preclude other actions by the authors such as using the parts in other systems.
- That is, the author retains all rights except for the right of redistribution (as a perpetual paid-up license), which is granted to LDraw.org. The license should be non exclusive, the author is not precluded from licensing the parts to other entities under whatever terms they choose. However LDraw should also not be prevented from licensing to users under appropriate terms (of LDraw’s choosing, in case they need revision... there should not be a coupling).
- Since the license is perpetual authors cannot withhold permission for redistribution once submitted, and they cannot prevent others from improving the parts, that is, LDraw can allow other authors to modify or improve parts once submitted.
- The license that is granted should allow LDraw to do what it deems suitable with the submitted part, including redistributing it in what ever format or packaging is appropriate, or choosing NOT to redistribute it. That is, submission is not a guarantee of usage or distribution, there is a right but not an obligation to distribute. Some part may be later determined to be less than optimal and LDraw should not be bound to use it forever.
- The license should also allow LDraw to develop derivative works from submitted parts, usually via other authors carrying out improvements, but this can also include abstracting primitives out for use in other parts.
- This bears breaking out. A KEY feature needs to be that LDraw can package as appropriate (no more restriction that the original distribution format and file content needs to adhered to. This will require buy in from the Jessimans as it means breaking the terms of the original license, and allowing the library to be distributed separately from the original LDRAW program)
User Specific Goals
- Author protection: Users should not be able to claim the work as their own. The identifying marks in the parts that show who authored them and who modified them should be preserved under changes that the user makes. This should be auditable.
- Non pollution. The library itself should always be open source but mere use of the library should not force programs that use or distribute the library, or derivations of the library to themselves be open source. Being required to make their work open, or to give it away free (because they got a free and open input) because of transitive library issues seems wrong. One interpretation of GPL, (which thankfully we think isn’t a serious contender at this point) suggests that would be the case.
- No restriction on usage. Users should be able to do whatever they like (including using the parts as input to creation of a competing format) subject only to the above provisos about identification, without restriction and without payment of fee, even if they use the parts in a commercial work.
It seems clear to us that there ought to be two licenses. LDraw.org needs to be
a conduit or intermediary. That is, there needs to be some distinction between
what an author grants Ldraw and what LDraw grants the user rather than it being
a straight author to user license.
Hence there ought to be a contributors or authors license, used by authors to
grant rights to LDraw.org for their submissions, and a users license, used by
LDraw.org to grant rights to users of the library and the parts contained
within. As noted above, there should not be a coupling between them, the authors
license should not hinge on the user license having a certain wording or vice
versa.
Notes and open questions
On Author protection: We don’t currently enforce every change to the parts to
have an entry in the change history and that change history is not well
structured - using user initials rather than a clearly identifiable name. The
audit trail could be held in the PT, just as a record of who submitted a new
file but that would be complicated by the renaming that often happens during
development. Do admin edits to the headers constitute contribution to the file??
A possible solution is to track just changes in authorship in the file and track
more detailed things within PT itself.
One important issue that also needs addressing is the problem of Orphan Parts.
That is, there has to be a mechanism to ensure that other authors can do updated
versions of the parts if necessary, as long as history is preserved, even if the
author can no longer be found. This mechanism needs to be developed to cover
those parts that exist now for which authors cannot be determined or cannot be
contacted.
Another aspect of this is the open question, do we need to seek permission from
all authors? If so do we do it all at once? Or do we have two classes of parts
to handle the orphans were license can’t be secured? What does that imply in
additional work effort?
We suggest we try to identify all authors of parts in the current official
library and give then 2-3 weeks to respond in the affermative. The request
should be worded along the lines of “We believe you submitted this file for the
good of the LDraw community and we now just trying to formalise that. We’d
encourage you to allow your work to be distributed in this way” - We should
also mail all currently registered PT submittors, as this is the current
authoring community and we DO have email addrsses for them. That still leaves
the question of what to do about the parts for which no author can be contacted.
Not in scope
We do not speak to the LDraw.org trade dress or logos in this intent post as
those are separate issues and we feel they are well in hand already.
Dates
We would like to suggest some key dates for the decision making process.
- Let us take a checkpoint on the discussion of this intent in a week
- If it has reached consensus, or if no new ideas are being raised, we will take the input from the public back to our internal list and we wiil fomulate draft licenses. (we would gladly welcome draft submissions)
- We would then post the drafts for public feedback and solicit the Jessimans’ buyin, allowing another week of discussion for that.
- After that, we will take peoples’ input from the draft round and finalize the licenses.
LDraw.org Steering Committee
Kevin Clague
Tim Courtney
Chris Dee
Larry Pieniazek
Orion Pobursky
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Message has 8 Replies:
 | | Re: License Intent
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| One thing I touched upon a while ago that may be useful, is creating an entirely NEW library, with the same format, and only adding primitives and parts as authors give their consent to the new licence. This would allow the current "complete" (...) (20 years ago, 25-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)
| | | Re: License Intent
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| (...) I can't see the reason for this. Why shouldn't any user of the parts files have the same rights as LDraw.org? What special permissions does LDraw.org need, which it would be problematic to grant to all the users? Play well, Jacob (20 years ago, 25-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw) !
| | | Re: License Intent
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| (...) I'd like to add to this one. It became clear to me in a recent conversation that this goal should be more defined. When authors submit parts to LDraw.org, it should be under the understanding that LDraw.org will always distribute their parts (...) (20 years ago, 26-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, FTX)
| | | Re: License Intent
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| This is post to sum up my ideas before I pop off on holiday for a few days. 1) Consider making the license apply to more than just parts or the parts library. This would allow things like documentation or software to be distributed too. 2) I would (...) (20 years ago, 28-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)
| | | Re: License Intent
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| In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Larry Pieniazek wrote: snip (...) Larry: I think you missed an important user goal. The user wants assurance that parts will not disappear from the library when it is updated. The user has typically invested a great deal (...) (20 years ago, 28-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, FTX)
| | | Moving the License Forward
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| Everyone - First I want to offer the Steering Committee's apologies for the delay in moving this issue forward. We've spent some time discussing the license and now we are ready to present a proposed solution for comments and feedback. After talking (...) (20 years ago, 11-Jul-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw) !!
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