OSI Approves Three New Licenses

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 Another (the RTSP) was withdrawn because the license-discuss mailing list convinced the submittor that it wasn't ready.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."

Comments

Synopsys License?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently I attended a forum on interoperability of EDA (electronic design automation) tools that was hosted by Synopsys (one of the big companies in that field) at which Bruce Perens gave the keynote speech. They seemed to be rather enthusiastic about open source, and have released certain data formats (and supporting code) under a so-called open source license. I've read this license and it seems to be pretty good, but I'm not an expert in licensing. I was hoping to see if OSI had anything to say about it, but the Synopsys license doesn't seem to be on their "approved" list. Is this because it hasn't been evaluated yet, or because it's been rejected? I tried looking at the archived mailing list, but there was no search function and I didn't feel like navigating through months of archives.

If anyone from OSI (esp Bruce) is reading this, I'd be ever so pleased if you could respond. Thanks.

Re:My license

[aozilla]

It requires unreleased derivative works to be licensed to others.

1. Private modifications which are not released are permitted without restriction under fair use.
2. If you don't release a modified work, you have not created a derivitive work.
3. If you haven't released it, no one can use it anyway.
4. Practically speaking, this would only come into play if the modifications are stolen. If the modifications were stolen and released to the public, you could not sue anyone for using those modifications. This is intentional, as it is one of the loopholes in the GPL.

   It allows patented derivative works to be restricted (by the patent).

   You are granted a license from the creator of the derivitive work to use the work without restriction. My non-lawyer guess is that this would allow you to use any applicable method regarding patents. Third party patents would still apply of course, but I don't see any way to protect against this. If anyone could come up with a way to fix this, I'd certainly consider it.

   Why not just use the GPL?

   Because the GPL forces those creating derivitive works to release the source code to those works. I do not believe that the government should be involved in copyright law, and the purpose of this license is to cause all creators of derivitive works to abandon all rights under copyright law for the derivitive work. I do not believe the government should be involved in making sure that the creators of software release source code. Another problem with the GPL is that it is full of loopholes. I have attempted to create a free software license which is copylefted to the fullest extent possible under copyright law. In essence, I do not want the government or courts to ever get involved, except to throw out a copyright suit for a work which is derived from a work licensed under this license.