"THE IDEAFLOW LICENSE" (Revision 1):
<Author(s) (contact)> wrote this software.
As long as you retain this notice, you may
do whatever you want with it.
If you find this software useful, please
consider thanking the author(s) by offering
your thoughts (anonymously or otherwise) on
some ideas that they are developing. These
ideas are documented at the URL below, which
also includes a form for providing feedback.
The author(s) value your input regardless of
your familiarity with the material, and will
endeavor to present the material for which
they request feedback such that it does not
require domain expertise to assess. Feedback
need not be technical in nature.
Link to material for evaluation, and feedback
form: <url>The conventional academic mechanism for getting feedback on one’s work is peer review. This solicits the opinions of other academics, but it doesn’t access all the professionals, hackers, and makers that might provide high-impact evaluation of nascent ideas, particularly in engineering. It also doesn’t provide enough feedback to generate any statistics on the quality of an idea.
The Ideaflow license is an experiment. I’m an engineer, and I really value the thoughts and opinions of other people that build things. These folks, like myself, often participate in the open-source software ecosystem. We make use of software that other folks have written and contribute our own software to be used by other people. Most open-sourced software contains a license that describes how the author permits others to use their work. Ideaflow is such a license.
The Ideaflow license is based on the Beerware license, which states that "As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.”
Like Beerware, Ideaflow permits others to do whatever they want with the code, but it offers a different mechanism by which the user can thank the author. The license will include a link to material for review, and the person using the code is requested to look through that material and offer their thoughts/feedback/criticisms. That feedback will come via a form that’s also linked in the license.
I hope that this might help generate something like a peer-review ecosystem within the open-source community that doesn’t just operate on software that’s already written, but also operates on ideas, non-software-related work, etc. In addition to helping one another write code, it would be neat if we helped each other develop ideas.
At present, the software that I have published under the Ideaflow license directs to this landing page, which includes a link to material for review and a link to a feedback form.