Re: [brlcad-devel] [Open Manufacturing] Fwd: [scl-dev] RFC: Acceptable licenses for contributions

[Clifford Y. <cli...@gm...>]

> Hi everyone,
> What license(s) would you find acceptable for contributions to SCL?
> I'd like SCL's license to be lenient enough that it can be used by
> commercial entities, but strong enough that improvements make their
> way back to the rest of us.

My guess is the commercial players who may be interested in using and
contributing to SCL are most likely to have strong opinions about this
- would LGPL stop them from using SCL? (note that I am asking would
it, not should it - whether the open source guys think LGPL is a
show-stopper or not commercial folks dealing with legal teams might.)

(I should preface this with the note that these are just my own
private thoughts, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or
policies of any other group or project.)

I view STEP as one of the ripest areas for broad commercial/open
source collaboration in the CAD industry - everybody needs to read in
and write out STEP files but it's not an area of CAD development that
produces exciting, attention grabbing features for modelers.  There
are of course two competing philosophies when it comes to data export
- 1) do it well and everybody will want to use our product because
they are comfortable that we will let them move their data to another
tool if they have a need and 2) don't do it especially well to force
users to stay with our tool rather than accept loss of data fidelity
during export.  My sense is that no single CAD tool is in a position
to become and remain eternally dominant in the field, except possibly
in individual product domains or ecosystems.  I don't have first-hand
knowledge and commercial CAD licensing costs tend to be hard to find
online, but what I have heard suggests that even the big-time
commercial licenses are affordable enough that larger companies are
able to have more than one such tool in-house.  Even if they don't,
all sorts of products are created using multiple suppliers for various
parts and there is no guarantee that all parts of the supply chain
will use the same system.  That being the case, it's more or less a
fact of life going forward that all CAD systems will need to be able
to move data around and the reasons the STEP standard exists in the
first place are valid.  To my mind, this makes philosophy 1 above the
logical attitude to adopt, since 2 will basically have the effect of
making life difficult for customers without changing the realities of
the business world as it exists today.

There is a related precedent - the openexr image format was released
by ILM and has been adopted very widely in the movie industry, as the
various studios recognized that they needed to share data and the
difficulties of moving it around between various custom in-house
formats was adding useless overhead to the process.  (The SIGGRAPH
2010 Large Steps Toward Open Source panel was quite interesting in the
insights it offered into the thought processes of the folks working at
various studios - apparently in the earlier days of digital processing
every bit of software was regarded as a competitive edge/asset, and
only gradually did the awareness of the benefits of collaboration in
specific cases become clear.)  The Open Shader Language is another
similar project, although in earlier stages than openexr.  The analogy
is of course not precise in that the studios are basically both
producer and consumer of the software in question, but the notion that
it is beneficial for the entire industry and the players in it for
some features to be a common foundation between all tools certainly
seems relevant to me.

Those examples are instructive not just in terms of thought process
but also in terms of licensing - both OpenEXR and OSL are using the
Modified or New BSD license.  That's why I think it is important to
get input from potential commercial contributors on this topic -
first, whether they view the possibility of collaborative open source
development on common STEP functionality as an interesting/feasible
direction to go, and second whether they need something like the BSD
license to make it viable to do.

I won't be at SIGGRAPH this year, but if it's not too late perhaps
someone who is could set up an SCL (or STEP) Birds Of a Feather?
Dunno how much interest there would be, especially on short notice,
but it could be a good place to discuss something like that.

Cheers,
CY