Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Mychaela Falconia]

Josh Branning <lovell.joshyyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am very disappointed at this decision. I would really like to see this 
> project become free software.

The quest for licensing under your terms can be undertaken at a later
time when the project itself becomes a fait accompli.  As they say,
it's easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact than to ask to
permission upfront and then get into much worse trouble for going
forward anyway despite being explicitly told "No".

Look at what happened with Ancient UNIX in the 1998-2001 timeframe.  A
community of enthusiasts who loved the Ancient UNIX code (Research
UNIX V1-V7 as well as derivatives such as the original BSD that were
based on V7 code, then considered proprietary) convinced SCO to allow
legal personal hobbyist use of the code (whose status was previously
exactly the same as FreeCalypso today: code floating around amongst
folks, but no license whatsoever) through a special hobbyist license.

At first the license terms were nowhere close to RMS/FSF demands:
everyone who wanted to become a member of the hobbyist licensee club
had to sign and mail in an individual license agreement, along with a
license fee of $100 USD.  But those who bought such hobbyist licenses
were free to exchange modifications to the code (derived works just
like our FreeCalypso) amongst themselves, and the licenses could not
be arbitrarily revoked.  Later the $100 fee was dropped (changed to no
cost), but one still had to sign and mail in a license agreement.
Later it was changed to a click-wrap license, and then finally Caldera
released the whole thing under a BSD license, making it free software
in your sense at last.

I predict that the same evolution may well happen with FreeCalypso,
eventually culminating in something that your camp would accept as a
free sw license.  But I am not willing to ruin my chances of getting a
few additional source pieces by being an ass and demanding nothing
less than a full free sw license on something that was the world's
most proprietary code less than 10 y ago.

M~