Four New Open Source Licenses

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."

Comments

Lord of the Open Source....

[MosesJones]

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.

The Raptor license does that

[hawk]

> 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

The Raptor licenses do that. Noone uses them (ok, and if I'd put them all in one place it might help :)

Roughly as follows. Add up the clauses used to specify a license as "Raptor n"

Section 0:
You may do anything you damned well feel like with this source code, save as restricted under later clauses.

Section 1:
Any derived work must retain the copyright notices contained herein.

Section 2:
Any derived work must be under this license.

Section 4:
You must make the source code available in the same manner as the binary distribution for no more than duplication and shipping costs.

Section 8:
No derived work may link to any code not assimilible by this license.

Section 16:
No derivative work may be released under a license which restricts the ability to combine software under differing licenses in any manner.

Section 32:
Any distributions of source code or binaries must be made without modification: all modifications must be patches to source code unless written permission is obtained from the copyright holder.

Section 64:
No modified version may be distributed under the same name as this software.

Section 128:
Any advertising or packaging for this product must contain the acknowledgement
"RMS is a nunu-head" [phrase will vary]

Section 256:
The authors have realized that their actions conflicted with the terms stated in the original license. The original license was Raptor [number], while the correct and binding license is Raptor [number] with the following additional provisions
[provisions]

Section 512:
Changes to this license may be made by the following entities in the following manner:
[governance terms]

Notes:
Raptor 0 is all but public domain (it doesn't assign the copyright).

Raptor 1 is pretty much BSD/X

The GPL is pretty close to Raptor 15.

Clause 16 is a poison pill to prevent assimilation by the GPL for those who object to its proprty of only taking code from other licenses but not sharing back.

32 is Pine-ish

64 is Artistic License-ish

128 is old BSD

256 is for situations such as where software purports to release under GPL, but from day 1 had dependencies upon closed source software. The current Lyx license is like this.

I'm perionally partial to a stock 145, but . . .

:)

hawk, who reluctantly left the phrase "including coordinating nuclear attacks on Australia, plotting the overthrow of your government, or exterminating an endangered species" out of clause 0.

X.Net does NOT specify jurisdiction

[Compulawyer]

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.