Discouraging Forks: Sun's SISSL
Sun Microsystems wanted a more robust way to prevent the standard from being forked. Forking is a colloquial term used in the open source community to describe what happens when a cooperative project splits into two or more uncooperative separate projects. The result is either an opportunity or a problem, depending partly on whether you're the project being forked from or to, and partly on the ultimate success of the forked project's software in the marketplace. One of the risks of permitting derivative works of industry standard specifications and test suites is that competitors may move away from the standard. As I just described, The Open Group Test Suite License avoided that by requiring notice and documentation ...
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