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

WhooHoo!

[Arandir]

Not to name names, but one license had a restrictive patent grant that only applied to GPL'ed operating systems.

And what a bizarre license that was (not to name names). It was essentially the BSD license word for word, with the aforementioned patent grant. Yet you couldn't legally use the software on a BSD licensed operating system.

Another was more of a rant than a license.

A delicious rant to be sure. I quite enjoyed it, despite its wrongheadedness. It could not be approved of course, since it explicitly denied its own validity.

The one license that did pass was the Python Software Foundation License.

Whoohoo! In this age of a million open source licenses, it's nice to see that a sensible license that fills a gap in open source gets approved while the frivolous crap gets flushed.