Licence Changes and Naming of a Commercial Derivative

David Pratt david.pratt at tidesdk.org
Mon Dec 17 15:09:19 UTC 2012


Hi, I have two issues I'd appreciate advice about for our TideSDK project.

The first is that the core talent of TideSDK wish to create a
commercial derivative work called TideSDKPro. I understand that we
cannot create a for profit commercial entity under a non profit
organization so a comercial entity has been established. The first
question relates to our use of a related product name. The core
contributors of TideSDK involved in the commercial entity wish to
retain an association with TideSDK in name only for the commercial
entity. The TideSDK is an open source under a non-profit and will
continue this way. TideSDK will be continued to be developed by us.
The commercial entity will abide by the existing Apache 2 license and
build on top of the open source code. The commercial entity will also
contribute code to TideSDK under its licensing terms. My questions is
this:

Does SPI have any policy around the naming? Is there anything
preventing us from using a name derived from our open source project?
There seem to be other projects that have done such things. The most
recent in memory was Couchbase and CouchDB. Couchbase was formed by a
group of CouchDB's core contributors while CouchDB was Apache 2
licensed software.

The second issue for consideration is a licensing change from the
Apache 2 license to another open license of our choosing. We know we
want a license that encourages those using our code to contribute back
to the code base and perhaps something copyleft. We have a growing
base of users and we'd like to get this sorted sooner than later. My
second question is this:

How should we go about the license change to ensure this is handled
properly for our team and contributors.

Regards,
David


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