[foundation-board] Knight grant contract

Wed Dec 7 16:26:54 UTC 2011

On Wed, 7 Dec 2011, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Perhaps then we should leave it more open in the contract? OTOH, I
> don't know why we needed to get this letter since the contract already
> says "a GPL license".

Yes, it wasn't clear whether that included the AGPL, though I did argue
the toss. The Knight Foundation are very inflexible about these sorts of
arrangements; they even tried to hardwire the use of Github into the
contracts. When clarification was sought, we were told the AGPL didn't
qualify as being within the language, and that we should apply for
separate permission to use it.

We have some contact with other grantees and they have had similar
negotiations with Knight over specific open source licences.

The AGPL was the "preferred" licence only in practical terms: it is what
the generality of the existing server-side code is licensed under. I
realised as I wrote "our preferred licence" that this would be ambiguous,
but neglected to go back and fix it.

Mk