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OSI Approves Three New Licenses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the vanilla-chocolate-or-strawberry dept.

Russ Nelson writes: "In our monthly board meeting this past Wednesday, the Open Source Initiative approved three new licenses for use with OSI Certified Open Source Software: the W3C license, the Motosoto license, and the Open Group Test Suite License. In other action, one license was voted down because it violated the discrimination clause of the Open Source Definition. Another (the RTSP) was withdrawn because the license-discuss mailing list convinced the submittor that it wasn't ready. And one (the DSPL) goes back to license-discuss because we disagree with their analysis and want to re-negotiate it with them. Several people have suggested that we post the licenses that we have turned down, and explain just why they don't comply with the Open Source Definition. We don't want to discourage people from submitting licenses, knowing that their license might be held up for public notice. We'd rather encourage people with non-compliant licenses to fix them so they are compliant."

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. corrected link for Motosoto by randal_hicks · · Score: 2, Informative

    try this: Motosoto Community

  2. Re:Lets post the licenses and what's right or wron by julesh · · Score: 3, Informative

    I for one, as the author of the DSPL, the license that is going back for further discussion, would love to hear what slashdot people think about it. I can't comment on the others, but it is rather a departure from the traditional open source license...

  3. Re:steeling myself for a flaming, but... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    "freeware" is a blanket term that usually refers to any program in binary form or source code that is given away. In other words the "free" in "freeware" means free-as-in-beer, or stuff you don't pay for. For that reason it is extremely general and nonspecific. Both "Open Source" and "Free Software" are much more specific than "freeware". These days, the word freeware has come mostly to refer to software that is available for free in executable binary format only and is closed source.

  4. Re:Lets post the licenses and what's right or wron by rking · · Score: 2, Informative

    I for one, as the author of the DSPL, the license that is going back for further discussion, would love to hear what slashdot people think about it. I can't comment on the others, but it is rather a departure from the traditional open source license...

    Well, the whole executive committee and merit share holders thing gave the impression of over complexity to me and I doubt it'll be used widely, but I think that scheme is the heart of the licence so I'm sure you want to keep it :)

    One particular point was it seemed to revolve around having elections for every public release of the software, so far as I could see this would mean holding elections for every bug fix. I'm probably reading it too strictly but then there doesn't seem much point in a (quite substantial) written licence unless it's expected to be strictly adhered to.

    Is the thing about not being allowed to charge for the software itself important? If I understand correctly you mean I couldn't say "I will charge you $100 for this software" but I could say "I will charge you $100 for making a copy of this software for you" or something like that. If I've got that right, what's achieved by this and would you really want to be in the position of policing it?

    The GPL's approach of letting people charge what they want seems to have much the same practical effect given than market forces will bring down the price of freely redistributable software unless you can add some extra value.

    I'm not sure it's a good idea to include your interpretation of patent laws:

    "While it is not in general illegal to produce or distribute software such as this that uses patented methods, it may be illegal to use such software for any purposes other than 'private experimentation'."

    You might be right, I don't know, but I can't see you need to say it in the software licence just include the part about it being their responsibility to comply with the law. I don't know from reading it whether you were thinking of a particular jurisdiction (the USA maybe?) or all countries signed up to particular treaties or what. Stating what the law is "in general" in a licence that presumably may be used internationally doesn't seem like a good idea to me. You may be inadvertently misleading some people.

    I think the part about being able to make derivatives licensed under the GPL was good, given the state of the "market" it seems good to me to allow redistribution under one of the leading licences but then I like the GPL and I expect some will disagree :)

    Something I did find odd was that after specifying that derivatives could be under DSPL or GPL it then talks about pre-release versions being under a licence that prohibits further distribution, but with no real limits on what that licence might otherwise say - should this only be valid for a limited period or something?

    I'm not sure on the effectiveness of the final clause about using the software as a library. So far as I can see you can take software not released as a library, adapt it so it is now a library, release that library yourself under the DSPL and then link to it in exactly the way that (it seems to me) you're trying to prohibit.

    Okay, that was just a series of thoughts probably not entirely coherent that occurred to me as I read throught it. I hope I haven't sounded too negative, I guess I was looking for problems :) and I haven't spent hours poring over it of course so things I've seen as potential problems may be addressed better than I took in.

    Good luck with your licence.

  5. Re:Open source-ing Open Source Licenses? by Carlos+Laviola · · Score: 3, Informative

    Try this, this (Slashdot story here) and this. HTH.