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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."
OSI Turns Down 4 Licenses; Approves Python Foundation's
should read:
OSI Releases information on licenses, slashdot poster excited, no one else cares.
Open source needs less licences not more..
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)
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.
324006
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]."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, the entire reason the GPL exists is to promote Free Software; it's the GNU Foundation's opinion that allowing modification of the GPL would not work towards this goal. The main concern is that there would be a plethora of "GPL-derived" but not Open Source or Free Software licenses, thus diluting the usefulness of the license.
The GPL is, in its essence, an ideological manifesto. Disallowing others from modifying your manifesto is not inconsistent with the GNU philosophy - the only thing they desire is that you allow others to modify your code, not your thoughts.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Legal language has lots of latin in it, and the words have very precise meanings.
Best Slashdot Co
"GPL for documentation (don't remember what it's called)"
Free Documentation License (FDL)
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Probably to avoid companies to change the license so it doesn't allow FreeSoftware anymore.
But this is a good idea, why don't we try to submit this modification to GPL v3 or even GPL v4?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Intel modified the BSD license in the following ways:
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.
Seeing as this is about *nix licensing, shouldnt that be a tar.gz pit?
Sorry, not all of us are familiar with the OSI Licensing scene -- what are the three rejected licenses? It's kinda hard to get into the story when it assumes you already know what it's talking about.
Anyone care to enumerate the other three licenses?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Anyone besides me see the humor in the only FSF item which does *not* fall under the GPL is the GPL license itself :-)
So the Kallisys Reflexive License was the one turned down due to insufficient discussion... Right? :)
(It was apparently submitted for application but never approved). Somebody confirm please, me curious
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
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.
I disagree. The MPL is more or less GPL-derived. It's just that they got their lawyers together and made it look "different enough" so that nobody would accuse them of hacking the GPL, and that has not diluted the "usefulness" of the GPL.
Also, there are several other licenses (e.g., Sleepycat) that are GPL-like, but not expressly derived from the GPL.
The copyright restriction on the GPL can't prevent the proliferation of licenses. It just makes it harder for people who might want to use the GPL as a starting point. Their desire to prevent the "GPL brand" from being diluted is understandable. A more fair solution would be to allow unlimited modification of the GPL, as long as you didn't call your license the GPL.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?
The Free Software Foundation isn't worried about the GPL brand. They simply aren't interested in making a GPL derivative an easy thing to do. The Free Software Foundation wants you to use the GPL (duh!) so they have copyrighted the GPL in order to prevent people from easily making clones. If you want your own GPL-like license then hire your own lawyers and hope that they are as well acquainted with software copyrights as the folks who have worked on the GPL (good luck).
This might seem like a contradiction, but the Free Software Foundation isn't the "Information Must Be Free As In Free Beer Foundation." They are specifically trying to make sure that software comes with source code (and documentation :). They are not trying to make it so that all information is free.
So while you are certainly right that the GPL copyright can't make license proliferation impossible, it certainly does make it more difficult (and more expensive), and that's a net win for the FSF.
You're reading GNU's Free Documentation License (as you note). This license is intended to apply to user manuals, technical references and such. If you stop to think about the goal of Free Software (I'm not going into OS vs FS here), it's to make sure that Stallman can get the source to his printer drivers, modify them and then give them out to others (imagine a world where that printer had come with source under a BSD-like license!)
So, with that goal in mind, how would you construct a license that is both modifiable under the terms of the GFDL (which you quote) and still accomplishes the stated goal? The GPL can be used as a guide in creating your own license. This has certainly been done often enough. But, to modify the license itself would hurt the aim of Free Software.
I'm also not certain what the legal implications are if a license agreement affords me the right to modify it. The GPL has teeth that come directly from copyright law. Under copyright law, you are not allowed to modify or distribute the code except in accordance with fair use doctrin. The GPL acknowledges this fact, and then offers you an "out" in the form of a license (this is in direct contrast to EULAs and other "shrink-wrap licenses", which require you to accept the license before USING the software) which you can take or leave as you see fit.
Now, if you were allowed to modify the license, your software would have to refer to some "license archetype", perhaps backing that usage up using trademark (e.g. you can modify the GPL, but only if you give it your own name). This is sticky, and keep in mind that the GPL was a daring bit of legal hackery that has still yet to be tested in court. To add yet another complication to the core oddity of defending right-to-modify with copyright law would risk the basic goal by making the GPL harder to defend than it already was.
All that asside, I think it's of questionable value to refer to the restrictions on the GPL as hypocritical. The GPL is a software license, not a work of art or engineering. I'm not quite certain why you feel that it would be hypocritical to say that software is an area of human endevor where freedom to modify is important but contracts and licenses are not. You may disagree, and you are most welcome to. But even if I accept that the two should be treated the same (and I do not, obviously), you make a challenge of hypocricy here which I do not believe you have explained.
ony for the GPL crowd. For everyone else, it's tar.bz2
:)
hawk
I wonder ... how you would feel if I said that the Open Source world needs less IRC clients, not more. Seems to me that the stength of open source is its diversity. Microsoft's strength is its fascistic control. One EULA to bind them all....
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
After seeing half a million OSS licenses, I have concluded that the vast majority of them just don't get it. I'm not talking about the four "freedoms" of the FSF, but rather the freedom of the user not to be insulted by the licensing. Lawyers may love confusing, convoluted and non-parsable legalese, but the users do not.
(The following is my opinion, so please read it as such. When I refer to a "good" open source license, I am making a qualitative assessment, and not trying to set up criteria for any approval process but my own.)
The purpose of open source licenses are to grant the user a broad set of permissions and rights over and above those granted by copyright law. Their purpose is not to bind the user to the will of the licensor. A good open source license must be based on copyright law, not contract law.
The first thing a good license should do is grant unconditional permission to use the software. This should be so basic it to not be worth mentioning, but you would be surprised as some of the licensed submitted. Additionally, the use of the software should not be trigger for anything else. We don't want any EULA's here, thank you. The second thing a good license should do is clearly inform the user of their permissions. These permissions must not be predicated upon acceptance of any agreement. A permission may have conditions attached to it. If there is anything you wish the user NOT to do, make it a condition. Next the license should have a warranty disclaimer, to assure the user that they will not be sued if they contribute stuff to the project. You may (and should if you're a commercial project) include a real warranty as a separate legal document.
Notice that I haven't included anything about what you require the user to do. No blanket obligations. That's on purpose. Open Source and Free Software are NOT about making people do things. It is okay to make an obligation be a condition to a permission. It is not okay to make an obligation be a condition to the entire license. Remember, this is about what the user can and cannot do.
Software licenses as contracts was an invention of the proprietary software industry. There was a time not that long ago when copyright law as very vague as to the status of software. So the industry decided to use contract law instead, and created licenses that had such bizarre phrases in them as "by reading this sentence you agree to the following obligations...". That's bullshit and Open Source and Free Software should have nothing to do with such rubbish.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
7. By copying, installing or otherwise using the software, Licensee agrees to be bound by the terms and conditions of this License Agreement.
Yeah, right.
I log into a shell account and am held hostage to the wild fantasies of anyone who wrote some innocuous seeming library or kernel module. It's Python, for chrissakes. How can you not end up using it?
This is getting crazy. A previous poster only wants feminists or fetishists to use his work. Sheesh. When do we go back to being normal people? Private citizens are left alone to tinker and share, businesses pay some royalties. If things get muddled up, we have a few beers and then forget what we were fighting about. Ah, the old country.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
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the forms which seem to be right for you. Slippery when wet. For
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An OS means different things to different people. Linux has GPLed parts, but many BSD licensed parts, X licensed parts, QPL / MPL licensed parts, and more. Is a GUI an essecntial part of the OS? Are all the BSD licensed IP tools?
/opt is defined by including `optional' software. Nobodies defeinition is the same and its asking for a major disagreement.
Licensing something for GPLed `OS's is nearly as bad as the FHS saying
I disagree - the GPL is also an English text, protected by copyright law (it even includes a lengthy philosophical section in the Preamble). The function of the GPL is not protected, as it is not patented. This is why the MPL is legal, despite being heavily GPL-influenced, because it does not contain any actual stolen-from-the-GPL wording.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This software comes with no warranty. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
This page accidentally left blank
1. No Poofters
2. This program may not be used in a bat of custard if there is anyone looking
3. Three shall be the number of the count and the number of the count shall be three, thou shalt not count to two unless thou also counteth to three, nor shall thou count to four, five is right out.
4. There is no 4
5. Is right out
6. SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM! Wonder SPAM! Wonderful SPAM
7. The program to which this license is attached may be used for any purpose whatsoever without payment provided that (1) this license is included in its entirety intact and (2) the provisions of sections 2, 4, 5 and 8 are complied with on alternate Wednesdays and sections 8, 9 and 4 are complied with at all other times
8. All copies of this program be distributed with the distributors choice of (a) the program source or (b) a bottle of Wostershire Sauce made from genuine Wostershires.
9. EEEK!
10. Naaawwwwww...
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
GNU already has an Artistic License. They never could resist a pun. Which is why I overlooked the link -- my aging brain confused "poetic" and artistic". And it's also why the Poetic License is less funny than it hoped to be.
Nonono. That's not the issue at all. OSI have no say over the GPL. That's controlled by the FSF who , truth be told ,don't always get on well with the FSF. If the OSI facilitated a breach of the FSF's copywrite , I suspect that the FSF wouldnt get legal on the OSI about it, but I'm sure the OSI isn't really into the game of generating invalid licences.
I'm pretty sure you can add your own amendments to the GPL, but I think that's pretty much on a case by case basis and that does not necesarrily give the right to call it a GPL. But don't quote me on it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.