OSI Approves Two New Licenses

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Initiative approved two new licenses. One, the Academic Free License is a MIT/BSD-like license . The other one, the Open Software License is an apparently GPL-incompatible "viral" license with some obnoxious clauses. Both have an interesting "mutual termination for patent action" clause - basically, the license terminates if you file a lawsuit in any court against any software that is licensed under an OSI approved license containing the same clause."

Comments

Not MIT/BSD-like

[Glenn R-P]

The AFL, unlike MIT and BSD, does not require that the copyright
be maintained in derivative works, but only in distributions of
the Original Work.

Recursive licenses!?

[hey]

"The AFL is itself copyrighted (with the right granted to copy and distribute without modification). This ensures that the owner of the copyright to the license will control changes. The Apache license contains a copyright notice, but the BSD, MIT and UoI/NCSA licenses do not."

So what license is the text of the AFL licensed under?

Re:Viral licences remain untested in court

[cduffy]

The GPL sets out how the user of the GPL would like the infringer to be treated, but until we have a court case where a court has ordered such compliance, we don't know. I welcome citations people may have.

No, the GPL does not set that out. The GPL sets out what one must do to comply; it says nothing about what the court is to do to an entity which is guilty of infringement (and indeed it can't, as such an entity may not have accepted the license at all). For some background on the enforcement process as it actually occurs, read Moglen's paper, Enforcing the GPL.

Clauses 4 and 5 of the GPL make it clear that what happens upon a breach of license is simple termination of that license, and the subsequent reversion to standard copyright law. If any person whose work is infringed requests specific performance (in particular, the release of an infringer's code) as remedy from a court, that will be their own decision -- and if and when the court declines to provide said remedy, that will be a test not of the GPL itself but only of the legal feasability of that particular remedy. It will most certainly not impact the ability to enforce the license through (say) obtaining a court order to halt any release or sale of infringing code, or findings of monetary damages, or any other alternate penalty.

Replying to this post indicates agreement with the following terms. All source code you have ever written (whether it includes this post or not) must be assigned to me.

Needless to say, I don't agree with said terms (not that it'd matter if I failed to make this explicit -- there's no valid contract, implied or otherwise, in my response; go look up the requirements for the same).

Re:It bears repeating

[Russ Nelson]

Under the Berne Convention, everything is copyrighted. There is no path from there to the public domain except through expiry of the copyright. Read this month's Linux Journal.
-russ