Language for contracts to affirm client commitment to open source free software

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/ch01.pdf
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derivative works be distrib-
uted on the same terms under which the licensee was permitted access to the work
under the original license. This means that those people who receive copies of these
works must themselves be able to redistribute the original and to make derivative
works from the original, subject only to the limitation that they allow others to do
the same.

By requiring that copyright
holders both make available a user-modifiable source code for programs that they
distribute and by requiring that they permit the development and distribution of
derivative works, open source licensing makes possible three substantial improve-
ments over traditional proprietary commercial software licensing models.
The first, and perhaps the greatest, of these benefits is innovation. It is now well-
demonstrated that programmers are willing to contribute to open source projects for
no reward other than that of making a program more useful. Open source works.
The more programmers that can contribute to a given work, the more value that
work is likely to have.
†
The second benefit is reliability. Many programmers means many people who are
available to debug a given program. Moreover, the benefit is not simply one of num-
bers. A knowledgeable user, who has witnessed firsthand the limitations of a particu-
lar application or the effects of a bug on a program’s operation, is generally in a
better position to address that limitation or to fix a given bug than an employee of the creator of the original software. Such a user almost certainly has a greater incen-
tive to correct such a shortcoming in a given piece of code than a software publisher,
where suggestions to make such corrections must compete not only with other per-
haps more pressing corrections, but also with the publisher’s own financial or orga-
nizational limitations.
The third benefit is longevity. When commercially licensed software goes “out of
print” and is no longer supported by its publisher, there is generally no way that soft-
ware can be updated or adapted to new uses. Such software comes to an evolution-
ary dead end. By contrast, open source licensed software can fall into disuse for some
period but still be revived, adapted, or rewritten by a subsequent user who finds a
use for it—a use that may be completely different from the use originally intended.

the basic principles of
open source licensing: open source licenses must permit non-exclusive commercial
exploitation of the licensed work, must make available the work’s source code, and
must permit the creation of derivative works from the work itself.

Resolution

Example note to potential client:

We need something added to section X ("Work for hire") to reflect the commitment to open source free software which I discussed. We are not going to take work done and try to duplicate it for any other client or for a competitor, but it is very important to us that work we do not be locked away from the community that makes our work possible. We're suggesting this:

"Company commits to make available the source code of work done on Drupal core, existing, and new modules under the terms of the GNU Public License Version 2 (GPL2)."

We would probably be comfortable with different language or a reasonable embargo period.