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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)
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.
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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.
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
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
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