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."

Comments

Ummmm...thanks for the update

[BillyGoatThree]

In other news, I just had lunch. It was eggs with cheese, sausage and banana bread. Now I'm working on modifying the docs for the app I fixed. If you promise to keep me posted on what licenses OSI is rejecting, I'll promise to let you know when I get my hair cut.

Re:Wait a minute!

[Trepidity]

If you'd read the GPL, you would answer your own questions. The GPL is a copyrighted document that grants you explicit permission to redistribute it in unmodified form. Thus the GPLed software that includes the GPL license is obviously not in violation, as they are explicitly granted a right to distribute it. What is not granted is a right to modify the GPL itself. The reasoning for this was that if modification were allowed it would dilute the usefulness of the license, as "GPL-derived" licenses might not even be Free Software or Open Source.

You can however provided added or amended licensing conditions without modifying the actual text of the GPL; for example "this program may be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL with the added requirement that [blah blah]."

tortious

[wiredog]

Tortious refers to torts. Which is the fancy way of saying "lawsuits".

Legal language has lots of latin in it, and the words have very precise meanings.

Restrictive Patent Grant License

[topeka]

The restrictive patent grant license mentioned was probably the submission from Intel, which was a version of the BSD license with patent language added: From this e-mail:

Intel modified the BSD license in the following ways:

1. Intel made OPTIONAL the inclusion of a copyright notice (i.e., "Redistributions of source code of the Software may retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer").
2. Intel added certain definitions derived from the patent license in the Common Public License, and added a license grant under certain Intel patents to distribute Intel software contributions, alone or as incorporated in any operating system licensed under the GPL (version 2.0 or later).

Let's name some more names...

[Anonymous Coward]

errg, hit the submit button by mistake.

The Poetic License

states that:
"The software covered by this license makes no claims about copyright, copyleft or even copy centre (where you take it down to the copy centre and copy it). Make as many copies as you want, for whatever purpose, even if it is to sacrifice those copies in a great floppy pyre. You may even claim copyright, ownership of trademark, originality or patent. You may even sue the real originator for a breach of your claimed copyright. However, this license can't guarantee that this will be in any way successful."
(har de har har)

The CMGPL
The GPL without a bunch of sections? Which ones, you ask? Mostly the ones that don't count!

The Intel BSD+Patent License
Like BSD, but grants a patent license. Patent license is specifically not granted to use under non-GPL OS's, or with modified versions, although copyright license is the same as BSD.

Re:WhooHoo!

[Arandir]

Well, you heard of "weak copyleft?" Well this is "stong unrestricted." You get more permissions than the MIT/BSD license (really), but the license agreement must be retained in all distributions. This is different from the MIT/BSD licenses in that they require the license to be included, but not necessarily applied to, any copies or derivations.