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OSI Turns Down 4 Licenses; Approves Python Foundation's
Russ Nelson writes "The Open Source Initiative turned down four licenses this week. Not to name names, but one license had a restrictive patent grant that only applied to GPL'ed operating systems. Another was more of a rant than a license. Another was derived from the GPL in violation of the GPL's copyright. And the fourth had insufficient review on the license-discuss
mailing list (archives). The one license that did pass was the Python Software Foundation License."
how do you think OSI feels about the definitive license?
~~~ the problem as i see it is that i have absolutely no personality of my own.
besides using all caps in an agreement/contract and triggering the lame lameness filter;
...OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION...
All that legalease will keep most mortals a hare's breadth away from comprehending.
I wonder if "tortious" action is like a gui user dropping back into his/her "shell"?
{SEG} sorry for the bad puns...I can hear most of you going "tcsh-tcsh"...
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Seeing as this is about *nix licensing, shouldnt that be a tar.gz pit?
Anyone besides me see the humor in the only FSF item which does *not* fall under the GPL is the GPL license itself :-)
The Artistic License is one I like. I'm always suspicious of an open source license that either a) has a polemical preamble that tries to coerce your behavior, b) reads like the team of lawyers who wrote the license are making a lot more money than the developers, or c) presumes that the only good programmer is one who either programs as a hobby, is an academic, works for a big company that can afford to subsidize the programmer's time, or works for an end-user company that can afford to build complex systems strictly for internal use -- in other words, that there's no moral way to be a software vendor.
:-)
Yeah, I know there's plenty of room for argument all around, but my sympathies are with small software vendors who need some way to get enough revenue from 100-5000 licenses to pay salaries. The Artistic License strikes me as compact and commonsensical, and a good model for many situations. And of course it has the coolest name.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
As if free-as-in-speach and free-as-in-beer weren't enough, now we can add free-as-in-Python to the list. :)
Seriously. I wrote a lot of public domain code a while back, that I found in many systems later on.
And then for some of my political software work, I used the Freeware for Feminists license - basically free, so long as the user was sympathetic with a feminist cause, and not granted for anti-feminist usage. Kind of viral, but I did make a splash screen and gave out source code with the compiled code.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
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