Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Template contract for OpenACS projects

Really, it seems this thread is about goals and guidelines for those who want to extend the OpenACS toolkit --regardless of any business contract or status of any legal entity, be it nonprofit, for profit, or simply for OpenACS.

Torben, if you've gotten that idea it's because you've paid no attention to what I've said, and paid all attention to what Peter's said. By simply reading my initial post - including the third paragraph, which you and Peter seem to have missed - you should be able to realize what this thread is (or was) about: kindly offering a template contract for OpenACS projects (defined as such commercial projects that are aimed at altering the toolkit) that may be used by business parties who don't already have a better contract template around and who want to be sure that their contracted terms don't conflict with the community interests.

The point of having a template, model, or typical example of any sort of thing is that it provides a service to people who are going to produce some specific variant of this general type of thing. So a contract template provides a service to people who are going to produce a contract. If the contract template doesn't suit their needs, they can just say thanks but no thanks and produce a contract from scratch or from another template. The template is just an example.

Saying that the mere existence of a contract template providing a service to those who are in the situation of commercially producing code for the OpenACS toolkit will limit the market to such projects is like saying that just because a tool exists we're forced to use it. I've been diplomatic enough to call this idea naive. In fact, we could (hypothetically) produce a contract template stating that commercial use of OpenACS is prohibited or any other kind of madness, and this would not limit our market or freedom in any way. The only effect such a template would have is no effect at all, because nobody would sign a contract based on it.

And even if some parties would find it in their interest to sign a contract like that, this would have no effect on the OpenACS community and the rest of the world who didn't sign the contract. The fact that a contract only determines the behavior of those who independently and willingly agree to it is so fundamental to law that it goes without saying (thought I). So, "comparing a basic contract of an open-source project with a proprietary project" should not have to be necessary to make it clear that "the relationship remains between the two parties".

Naively, I hoped it was possible to produce a contract template that more than one set of company/client find to be a useful example for more than one project of the same sort. Others who were equally interested in corresponding contract templates for other sorts of projects could do the same, I figured. I have given up on this idea. The obstacle in the way of succeeding with such a task is the widespread notion that attempting to pull a stunt like that means you're a dictator and not a community servant and that "template" is Swedish for "Quran".

I'm very happy if we have managed to create guidelines for work on extending the toolkit. This was not the initial goal with this thread, however.