OSDV Foundation Public License Draft Published for Review

Happy Friday–
Apologies for the apparent radio-silence these past few weeks since returning from the Overseas Voting Summit in Munich.  We’ve been very busy: handling 2 elections jurisdiction proposals and another large voter outreach group’s request to adopt portions of our open source elections technology framework, with lots of related work effort.

But today, at the end of a particularly busy week, I am completely stoked to share a significant milestone with you:

The delivery into our Request For Comment process of the our draft public license for all of the TrustTheVote Project’s software technology.

The OSDV Foundation Public License is being referred as the “OPL.”

As promised several weeks ago, our Legal Department, in collaboration with and leadership from Heather Meeker of Greenberg & Traurig (our licensing counsel), has completed the first DRAFT of the OSDV Foundation royalty free open source License.

The draft is accompanied by a “Rationale Memo” which explains the reasoning behind decisions made in the drafting of this License under which all open source code from the TrustTheVote Project will be made available on a royalty free basis.

We are now passing these documents into the RFC (Request For Comment) process within our TrustTheVote Project Stakeholder Community, which numbers in excess of 200 individuals.  But we want everyone’s comments, and encourage you to offer your input, even if you are not yet a Stakeholder Community member (you may request an invitation to join that community from stakeholder-replies at osdv dot org.)

We wish to publicly thank Heather Meeker and her team at www.gtlaw.com for all of their wonderful support and guidenace in this effort.  Seriously, if you ever have any needs for technology licensing lawyers who have been at the center of the open source legal and policies issues since it all began, you need to check out Heather’s team.

We believe these documents together will (finally) clarify our reasons for having to develop a new license and should put to rest the swirling rumors, theories, and opinions on our licensing strategy.  We look forward to your remarks nonetheless.

Have a great weekend!
Gregory