After some internal conversations about our goals for Zocalo, CommerceNet has agreed that the Zocalo code will be released as Open Source under the MIT
license (AKA the X11 license). The MIT license is short and simple and grants broad rights to use the code. It’s likely that other CommerceNet Lab projects will be released with the same license when they are ready. I’m quite pleased with this choice, since it means the broadest possible usability for the code. Anyone who finds interesting ideas or useful implementation details in the code will be free to use them in any way that makes sense to them.
We’re making good progress on building support for an experiment being planned at George Mason University by Ryan Oprea, Robin Hanson, and David Porter. They’d like to be running the experiment through most of April, and I’m working on getting it ready. I expect to spend 1-2 weeks cleaning up and organizing the code after the code is ready for them so I’ll feel comfortable publishing it. It won’t be done, but it’ll be presentable. From there, we’ll plan out next steps, and look for sensible projects for volunteers to help with. (Yes, we have some offers to help.)
For the moment, I only distracted myself from development long enough to change the copyright notice in all the source files, change the package name in all java files to net.commerce.zocalo, check it all in to our internal source control system, and write this blog entry. Now back to work.