Eigenbase Participation

The Eigenbase Project

Synergy

One of the strategies of The Eigenbase Project is to encourage participation from the software industry in a fashion that does not conflict with the main goal of public benefit. For this to work, sufficient incentives must be offered to for-profit corporations as well as open-source contributors from other projects. To achieve this, Eigenbase takes an innovative approach to intellectual property sharing in order to meet the following requirements:

The project's goal of being able to distribute all contributions to the general public under an open-source license must not be compromised.
Common frameworks must be made available to participants under several different open-source licenses, since not all open-source licenses are compatible with each other.
In exchange for making significant open-source contributions, for-profit participants must be able to combine those contributions with the Eigenbase frameworks in order to build commercial products containing proprietary closed-source code. This is the fundamental bargain advocated by the open-source movement.
Participants may wish to protect their own contributions to ensure that no other party is granted a more permissive license than that offered to the general public.

The community diagram below illustrates the intellectual property (IP) structure used by Eigenbase in order to accomplish these goals:

Explanation:

Eigenbase defines green, yellow, and red intellectual property zones. There is only one green zone, which contains all core frameworks and modules, and whose usage and development is shared freely by all participants. Each participant defines its own yellow zone and red zone.
All participants are required to assign joint copyright to Eigenbase on all contributions to the green and yellow zones. (For a corporation, this includes contributions from any of its employees.) Eigenbase assigns joint copyright on each yellow zone to the corresponding contributor alone. In the diagram, this is illustrated by the large gray rectangle representing Eigenbase's ownership, which overlaps the dashed rectangles representing the ownership areas of specific contributors.
Eigenbase distributes the union of the green zone with all of the yellow zones to the general public as open-source under the GPL (and only the GPL, since it prevents exploitation by closed-source products). This is what is meant by a yellow zone being open-source yet protected. Red zones contain proprietary closed-source code and are never even seen by Eigenbase.
Likewise, contributors from the Free Software community may choose to protect their contributions by specifying that they are GPL-only (and hence can never be used in closed-source products), creating their own yellow zones. By default, modules contributed by individuals become part of the green zone.
Eigenbase may choose to distribute components from the green zone (but never the yellow zones) under other open-source licenses besides the GPL. For example, if another open-source project wants to incorporate portions of the green zone under the Common Public License (which is GPL-incompatible), Eigenbase has the right to release those components under the Common Public License.
A participating company may sell closed-source licenses on the union of the green zone with its own yellow and red zones. However, it may not use code from the yellow or red zones of other participating companies unless it negotiates a non-GPL license agreement with them. Eigenbase itself is never a party to such agreements between for-profit entities.
Before making contributions, a participant enters into a bilateral agreement with Eigenbase; the agreement constitutes a legal implementation for the desired relationship by
- specifying the standard joint copyright assignments
- restricting Eigenbase to GPL licensing for yellow zone contributions
- granting the participant a dual (non-GPL) license on the green zone