General¶
What is the status of FreeU?
FreeU is currently under development and is expected to become operational early Q2 2021. The primary work that remains is related to the distributed
ledger.
Who is behind this effort?
FreeU was founded by Tom Johnson (@FreeUFounder).
Work began on the system in early 2019 and continued through the pandemic.
How is FreeU funded?
Up to now FreeU has been a "bareknuckles bootstrap" venture that has received no funding from outside sources. Eventually FreeU will be funded through
voluntary donations by developers when they setup their distributed ledger
wallet. FreeU will not offer premined cryptocurrency or use other dirty
funding tricks.
How will FreeU be governed?
The intention is to setup a non-profit for this purpose.
Licensing¶
Is FreeU an "Open Source" Licensing System?
We can't call it that yet.
The FreeU licenses are based on Larry Rosen's excellent OSL 3.0 license, which is considered an open source license by the Open Source Inititive. FreeU believes the FreeU Liberal License, the FreeU CopyLeft License, the FreeU Strong CopyLeft License, and the FreeU Transparent Strong CopyLeft License to be compatible with the OSI definition, but until approved by the OSI, we are unable to call these "Open Source" licenses. Our plan is to submit the licenses to OSI for a determination.
Please note: Larry Rosen has not endorsed these licenses.
Are these licenses compatible with permissive licenses?
Generally yes. Derivative and collective works based on permissive licenses
like the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses can be used in FreeU licensed software.
Developers should comply with the requirements of these licenses when
incorporating them into FreeU licensed software.
Are these licenses compatible with LGPL licenses?
Generally yes for libraries. Merely linking to LGPL licensed software
(as in the case for a collected work) does not require the larger work to
be LGPL licensed.
Are these licenses compatible with GPL licenses?
No. The FreeU licenses impose additional requirements on licensors and are
therefore incompatible with the GPL.
Why so many licenses?
The FreeU Licensing Scheme balances a number of complex requirements in order to create a space for paid free software development. We ascertained that while it might be possible to create a single license that met the objectives, that license would not be seen to meet the OSI definition of an Open Source License.
The four corridor licenses are all very similar, with minimal wording changes between them. The licenses can be seen as a "license state machine" in that only certain transformations are possible.
The FreeU Paid license is not compatible with OSI's Open Source Definition.