[Vanhackspace] Proposed change to principles: requiring openness on VHS projects

[Richard Sim]

I'm the one who brought this up in the IRC channel several weeks back when I
was looking into joining VHS.

What defines "VHS infrastructure"? Does that differ significantly from
"anything developed at the space"? While I understand your point about what
could come down to problems with people making money off of VHS's servers,
but what about everything else? My primary concern when bringing it up
initially was about what if I worked on a private electronics project at
VHS, and how do the VHS principles force my hand as to what I do with the
project. I'm talking about doing some soldering, using a scope, printing a
circuit board to etch, using the wireless, and so on at VHS. All that to me
is "VHS infrastructure", but I don't think it's the intention of the VHS
principles to mandate that I'd have to open-source the project (nor the
intention of the proposed principle changes, but the wording still makes it
seem that it does).

-Richard


On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:52 PM, Derek Anderson <derek at chargedmultimedia.com
> wrote:

> I think that we are going to have to allow alternative licenses to the GPL.
> Not all "OPEN" licenses are compatible with the GPL, which may restrict our
> source libraries on projects (ie: what if we want to use Sun or AGPL
> licensed code).
>
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses has a list of all the OSI approved
> licenses, and I propose we accept any of those.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Jeff Davis <jeff at textsfornothing.com>wrote:
>
>> Our principles[*] currently say that VHS is a "GPL/Creative Commons"
>> space and require that anything developed at the space be released under
>> the GPL or a Creative Commons license.  This came up at tonight's
>> infrastructure meeting, and it was proposed that we change this to say
>> that VHS group projects and projects using VHS infrastructure must be
>> "open," in two senses:
>>
>> (1) Anyone can participate.
>> (2) The project must be released under a free/open source license (not
>> necessarily the GPL).
>>
>> This would mean that if you are running a project on our servers, or
>> doing substantial development work on it using our servers, you'd need
>> to release your code under an open license.  If you're just working on
>> something on your laptop, no such expectation would exist.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>> [*]: http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/doku.php?id=principles
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