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Four New Open Source Licenses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-and-more-choices dept.

Russ Nelson writes "OSI has approved four new Open Source licenses. The X.Net is BSD with jurisdiction specified (note that RMS says that the GPL is not compatible with such licenses,) the New Artistic, currently that used by Perl (one paragraph added), the Sun Public License is Mozilla 1.1 with minor differences, and the Eiffel Forum License. We also modified the rationale for Open Source Definition clause 9 to remove the word "contaminate" referring to the action of the GPL."

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Lord of the Open Source.... by MosesJones · · Score: 4, Interesting


    With this many licenses around its getting a bit silly. A friend of mine runs the Scope HMVC project Scope over at Sourceforge and had to change the license slightly so as to enable work to pay him to do it. As more and more licenses come on board it just means more work for the lawyers. Isn't it time that there was a dynamic Open Source license which had a series of checkboxes that dumped out the license appropriate to your project at the end of it.

    This is meant to be high tech, but our foundations are still paper.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  2. X.Net does NOT specify jurisdiction by Compulawyer · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When I saw the /. summary, I was concerned. Then I read the license. A true jurisdiction provision states that any disputes must be litigated in a specified forum (usually the home city/state of the company that wrote the license). Such provisions can be extremely burdensone, even to the pint where under the right circumstances, courts will refuse to enfore such provisions.

    Thankfully, the X.Net license does not do this. What it has is a Choice of Law provision which is drastically different. It specifies that no matter where a dispute is litigated, the court must apply California state law and United States (federal) law.

    I can see where this could potentially lead to problems, however -- courts generally (especially state courts)don't like to have to use another state's laws in their own courtrooms. Also, what happens if California decides to enact the UCITA?

    All in all, the X.Net license is a model of simplicity and clarity.

    --

    Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.