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OSI Asks Microsoft to Change the MS-PL
Xenographic writes "The OSI has identified two significant flaws in the Microsoft Permissive License, and is unlikely to approve it as an OSI license in its current state. Specifically, the OSI is worried about the way the MS-PL is incompatible with so many other OSI-approved licenses and how misleading that makes the term 'permissive' in the license's name. Now the ball is in Microsoft's court and they can choose to amend or withdraw it from consideration. From the article: 'The MPL is also particularly restrictive, and is uniquely incompatible with the maximum number of other open-source licenses, [president of OSI Michael Tiemann] said, noting that in its examination of license proliferation, the OSI had encouraged experimentation with license terms to encourage new ones to be written that were better than what currently existed.'"
Nobody gives a shit!
In the corporate world and in hippyville, they are very different.
(I have karma to burn, apparently)
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Why isn't there a chart of the various licenses ranging from least restrictive to most restrictive?
That way it would be easy to show where a new license fit in and whether it was actually needed or whether it duplicated an existing one.
It would also show gaps where licenses do not exist right now.
And best of all, it would allow you to draw a line and say "anything below this line is compatible with the GPLv2 (or v3)".
As the various laws change, the chart would have to be updated. But it would solve this issue with Microsoft once and for all.
"We don't like the name, and we don't like it."
Are you adequate?
Microsoft's license might not be compatible with other open source projects? Say it isn't so Bill, say it isn't so!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Something from Microsoft is "uniquely incompatible"?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yes you can. Public Domain is less restrictive than just about anything else.
Yes, IF "either of them were strictly more permissive".
But they're not. Nor did I say they were. In a chart, they would be lateral to each other. The same licenses (such as Public Domain) that were acceptable to the GPLv2 would be acceptable to the GPLv3. But that does not mean that the GPLv2 is acceptable to the GPLv3.
Again, I did not say they were. In a chart they would be side by side. They have restrictions, but they have different restrictions. Anything BELOW them would have to have the SAME restrictions but FEWER of them.
Reading the license, it looks like a pretty ordinary, simple, GPL-ish license. IANAL, and I'm sure the OSI knows what they're talking about when it says it's incompatible with lots of other OSI-approved licenses, but after reading the article and the license, I'm still completely in the dark about why it's so incompatible.
Find free books.
This is the license in question: MS-PL. The OSI complaints are without basis. OSI wants them to change their name and to make their license compatible with other open source licenses. The first complaint is a joke. The second is an even bigger joke. Open source licenses need to be compatible with other licenses to get approved now? The rule is obviously of recent manufacture.
Nope, it's a chair.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
One of the main GOOD parts of the GPLv3 is that it's compatible with the Apache License now and I think some others, too.
The only new incompatibility I'm aware of is the GPLv2, and only if you hate the "or later" clause.
There's no good reason not to use it except FUD: I mean, you can word the "or later" clause to say "or any later version of the GPL approved by X" and all you have to do is have X's okay to allow for an upgrade. For Linux, it could be "or any later version of the GPL approved by Linus" and we'd still be at GPLv2, but Linus would have the option of going to GPLv3 with minimal pain if ZFS was GPLv3 and the wanted to add it to the kernel (or whatever).
And no, that doesn't retroactively pull the rug out from anyone. The licensee (NOT the licensor) gets to choose which license they want to choose out of all the available choices.
IANAL, but I got this information from people who are lawyers.
The MPL ... is uniquely incompatible with the maximum number of other open-source licenses.
The maximum number would be all of them.
...I think:
7.Application
6.Presentation
5.Session
4.Transport
3.Network
2.Data Link
1.Physical
The game.
Open source licenses need to be compatible with other licenses to get approved now?
In general, incompatibility with other open source licenses is considered a bad thing, yes. If they are in fact "maximally incompatible" I would say that's a problem. On the other hand, I would like to see what they specifically claim are incompatibilities. I'm not sure that I see any showstoppers.
Source:
(Excessive linkage in the original preserved.)
So, as you can see, GPLv3 is Apache-compatible, GPLv2 is NOT.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There are open source projects. There are Open Source licenses. The trouble is that using a certified Open Source license does not necessarily result in a project that is open source by any meaningful definition.
This sounds like nonsense and therefore requires explanation. Pick your favorite BSD. Would you call it open source? Certainly. You can download the source and do almost whatever you want with it. Is the source available because the license requires it or because the authors decided to make it available? The source is available because the authors decided to make it available.
In theory, I could write a piece of code and distribute only binaries under the BSD license, an OSI certified Open Source license, such as the BSDL. It is possible to have Open Source code where no one but the author has the source. How is this open source in any meaningful sense?
Here is the problem. Most of the people submit licenses for certification that are used on genuine open source projects. The MS-PL is submitted in a vacuum - anything using it is hypothetical at this point. OSI knows that a certified Open Source license does not guarantee an open source project, and they depend on the goodwill of the participants. Depending on the goodwill of Microsoft is somewhere between naivete and insanity. They failed to design the license definition to avoid misuse, and they are trying to make up for it by ignoring their own definition.
No one expects lots of software to appear under the BSDL with no source available. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to expect Microsoft to offer MS-PL licensed software with no source and loudly trumpet how much Open Source code they distribute.
I hope it eventually gets approved. It will be fun to watch all the people who are in to OSS just to hate Microsoft. OSS fanatics equate Microsoft to Satan himself no matter what the context. Heh that popping sound you'd here would be all the zealot head's exploding.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
From the article:
Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy for Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash. :
"Look at it from my perspective. If I told customers we were working with open source and the OSI and they went to opensource.org and saw all the anti-Microsoft messages, what would they think? It just didn't make any sense".
Yeah. I think this guy should get the facts. http://www.microsoft.com/canada/getthefacts/default.mspx
Living is a horizontal fall
The mentions of that I see is no problem. Section 5 of the GPLv3:
(Emphasis added.)
What are those additional permission? Oh! They're extras that can be added or removed as needed. You know, like if you want to combine some Apache license code with the GPLv3:
Here's the GPLv3. Here's the GPL compatibility matrix.
If you want to say they're incompatible, even though actual lawyers see no problems with compatibility, by all means, show us the problem, but I'm going to want to know what legal authority you base it on.
Perhaps the law should make sense, but it doesn't. That's why smart people hire lawyers for their legal opinions, rather than reading the laws and making up their own mind about what they mean.
There already is an MPL, the Mozilla Public License. It's frequently referred to by that acronym. This one should be abbreviated MSPL
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
> If you quit being an ass and took five minutes to read the GPL, you'd discover that the GPL is incompatible with all open source licenses.
If you were some kind of lawyer, I might even believe you. But you're not, and you're contradicting people who are.
Now, if you'd have actually read the GPL, you'd know that it specifically allows "additional permissions" per section 7 and defines exactly how they act. And section 5's requirement applies only to things already under the GPLv3 (which, even then, preserves additional permissions you could have received separately... funny that).
I mean, you apparently can't read section 7 of the GPLv3. It spells out that the GPLv3 parts are GPLv3, that to use the work as a whole when it's composed of discrete parts with separate licenses, you have to follow *all* of the licenses involved, but that you can split off the section under some specific license and obey only that license.
So why the hell do you keep trolling around here making legal claims you cannot substantiate that contradict both the license and all the lawyers who wrote them?
(And who keeps modding you up for asking silly questions?)
That said, there may be good reason to reject this license. The summary and even the linked article don't make it very clear, but it certainly seems possible. The requirement to accept the license merely to use the software does seem like a potential problem, and I'm curious how Debian will react. Nevertheless, the reasons given in the summary (and apparently in the article as well, though I only skimmed it) do not seem like good reasons for rejecting the license.
As a side note: FLOSS developers have historically been less concerned with certification (or whatever OSI wants to call what they do) then they have been with compliance. For example, with POSIX, if you point out something that doesn't meet the spec, chances are it will be fixed. But if you point out that something hasn't been certified to meet the spec, the reaction is likely to be a big "so what?" When it comes to licenses and the OSI, I see no reason to change that attitude.
First, these licenses don't look bad to me. I really need more information about what the OSI's objections are.
Second... having an open source license isn't anything like the whole of the story. In fact, open source itself is only half the story.
Open Systems is at least as important as open source. Open systems means interfaces, APIs, protocols, and soon designed for interoperability, openly documented, and not under any single vendor's control. Samba is open source, but it's not implementing an open systems protocol because Jeremy Allison pretty much has to implement whatever Microsoft does. Heck, GCC has gone through periods where it was as proprietary as any Microsoft product, with all kinds of custom extensions that provided a barrier to entry for anyone who wasn't GCC or wasn't using GCC.
Microsoft's track record with open systems has been pretty bloody bad since long before the GPL was drafted.
When they started getting gung-ho about POSIX, that looked like a major turnaround, but the result was a POSIX implementation that was deliberately useless. They embraced open systems just enough to get NT into government purchases, and throttled it.
So let's see what they do *with* these licenses, before we get excited.
Where is migel, standing up for the rights of microsoft? Why isnt he jumping up and down claiming that this is not fair to the poor 800 pound gorrilla that is m$??
...
Sheesh, these people never stand up for anything
The GPL expressly requires the whole program to be under the GPL. That inherently involves relicensing of non-GPL parts.
Now, before you try it, taking a BSDL-ed code and releasing it UNDER a more restrictive license (for example, under the GPL) is called relicensing, which the BSDL doesn't allow (on the contrary). Therefore, you need the consent of the copyright owner of the BSDL-ed code to release it UNDER the GPL.
Who keeps modding you up, indeed?
I think we need a new category of mod: disinformative. Although, deformative might more fully distinguish it from troll.
Which you are.
Specifically, "as a whole".
The _combination_ is licensed under the GPL. The _parts_ which were licensed under other, compatible licenses remain licensed as they were.
Begone, troll.
Must be a full moon. The trolls are out in force.
...)
Parts vs. whole, and if you can't understand the difference, no wonder you would rather accept the standard MS EULA.
(Talk about appropriation, and the real reason MS is afraid of open source,
And if anyone is being flummoxed by this troll, the _parts_ which are not explicitly relicensed remain under their original licenses. Nothing in the GPL or any other license can change that.
Repeat after me:
Part vs. whole.
Part vs. whole.
Copyright law prevents relicensing except by the original author.
The _derivative_ work (the whole) is not the same as the part.
Part vs. whole.
Part vs. whole.
Repeat it several times, and you might begin to understand copyright law.
And you might begin to understand what Microsoft and the ??AA are trying to cheat you out of.
But, no, you are a troll, so there is no hope for you at all.
Colors and dotted lines. Using algorihtms to generate a projection according to some sort of user spec.
So you see that the chart has to have more than three dimensions. That is correct.
But you are ignoring the problem of defining the axes, and the units. And that problem is even harder than recognizing that there are more than three dimensions.
And then, who figures out the algorithms to project the various relationships into a two-plus-some-fraction dimension, probably non-continuous curve? and should we trust said legal/mathematical genius?
The name indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the concepts of open source and the legal problems underlying a license that opens the source.
The terms of the license are built on assumptions derived from that misunderstanding.
Calling the sharing of source code "permissive" is not a whole lot removed from calling the sharing of ideas "permissive". Assuming that sharing ideas is permissive behavior reflects the assumption that human relationships must be based in and controlled by tyranny.
And the text of the license, in its effort to be overly simple and yet support the assumption of tyranny, does, indeed support the assumption of tyranny.
You really can't reproduce the good effects of the GPL without writing something as complex as the GPL.
The complexity is in establishing the bases for allowable interaction in a way as to keep the gentlemen who join in the gentlemen's agreement behaving like gentlemen. This is most emphatically not permissive.
If you don't want to take the time to establish the bases of interaction, you really can't establish more terms than the BSD copyright declaration.
In particular, the attempt to say, "You can do anything as long as you do it under this license." results in a license that protects no one from anything.
If I were to be entirely crude, it's kind of like saying your code can have sex with the code of whosoever, but it has do so in this house and no other.
If I were to abuse the metaphor, the GPL would be kind of like marriage (polygamous), in that it establishes rules of conduct under which "fairness" and other necessary concepts of interaction can be established.
The BSD copyright declaration would be kind of like the legal doctrine of consenting adult, in the US. (Remember that, under said doctrine, adults can engage in "consensual behavior", but they are not legally absolved of all consequences of said behavior.)
But this metaphor makes the same error as the licenses in question, that there has to be some sort of tyrannical control over the exchange of information, and that anything which is not regulated by such tyranny is inherently (ergo) permissive.
And it still grasps at the lowest common denominator straw of that tyranny.
joudanzuki
and moron yourself.
What you wrote remains under the license you establish. No license can change that. (And that is part of the problem with Microsoft's attempts at creativity here.)
Copyright law establishes (by necessity) the concept of a derived work which is somewhat independent of the work derived from. If I go beyond fair use in borrowing from your work, I need your permission to do so legally. The result is a combined work.
The parts I borrowed from you remain your work, remain under your copyright, remain governed by whatever license you establish.
But the copyright of the combined work as a whole is mine.
My license for the combined work cannot contravert whatever license I get from you for the portions which I borrowed from you. But I _do_ establish the license terms for the derived work, as a whole.
The license in the BSD copyright declaration does not attempt to go beyond the law about derived works, and that is why it is so simple. But it also fails to establish any rules of behavior. Whatever rules of behavior might be established must be established external to the license in the copyright declaration. That's one of the reasons for three major BSD sub-communities -- each subcommunity has its own set of implicit rules.
The license in the GPL and similar licenses does go somewhat beyond the law, and therefore (attempts to) establish some rules of behavior. Because it does so, it has to have some fairly detailed discussion of the underlying assumptions, the context of application of those rules, etc., and it has to go to certain lengths to define the rules of behavior reasonably unambiguously.
These licenses Microsoft proposes attempt to establish rules of behavior without sufficient definition, context, or anything.
joudanzuki
Aren't your concerns covered by these parts of the GNU GPL?
For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software.
And also...
15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
16. Limitation of Liability.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
17. Interpretation of Sections 15 and 16.
If the disclaimer of warranty and limitation of liability provided above cannot be given local legal effect according to their terms, reviewing courts shall apply local law that most closely approximates an absolute waiver of all civil liability in connection with the Program, unless a warranty or assumption of liability accompanies a copy of the Program in return for a fee.
Twinstiq, game news
Maybe I didn't say it in every post in this particular sub-thread, but I have nowhere suggested that anyone can slap GPL on and remove BSD. In fact, I'm arguing that it's illegal.
So you're now saying that I can't legally do that. I agree with that.
Now what were we arguing?
I am not going to release your BSDL-ed code. I'm not even going to release any code you may have written and released under a BSD-style copyright declaration under GPL. I know I can't legally do that.
I might include some BSDcd-ed _files_ as part of a project which is _as_ _a_ _whole_ licensed under the GPL. If I do so, I will be careful to establish in the README that some files are not GPL, and I will not touch the headers of the BSDcd-ed files. If I make a formal release, I'll list the files, licenses, and copyright holders in the README when there are multiple licenses.
So it would appear that you are arguing with someone else at this point.
I, personally, would rather release any modifications I make to any code available under the license the original author used, because I cannot expect it to be worth my time to track the pieces I added and raise a fuss if my license to the mods are not respected. I personally feel that it is common courtesy and common sense to not attempt to mix licenses in a single file. That kind of thing can lead to a huge maintenance nightmare.
And that potential maintenance nightmare would be a practical impediment to legal mixture of GPL and BSD licenses in the same file.
Someone tried to release his own code under both the GPL and BSD-style copyright declaration, declaring the copyright and then offering the GPL as an alternative. I have to assume that he was just trying to make it easier for both camps to use the code. It was misguided and unnecessary, because linking BSDcd-ed code to GPL-ed code is not against either license if the project as a whole is under GPL. (The GPL does prevent linking if the project as a whole is _not_ under the GPL, but that only means that there will be files linked to it in GPL-ed projects that can't be linked to it in BSDcd-ed projects. We assume such files will have their BSDcd-ed counterparts in the BSDcd-ed projects.) But if the author really meant to allow a fork that did not contain the BSD-style copyright declaration, he really should have gone to the trouble of forking his source himself. (And should continue to provide new versions appropriately forked, as he might be inclined.)
But I am now re-hashing the history and the conclusion, which means that you have effectively trolled me.
joudanzuki
What exactly were your points?
Individual files can be licensed under different licenses than the project as a whole, although there is the matter of license compatibility, lack of which might make a project copyrighted, but impossible to legally publish, or maybe even to legally use.
I suggest you go re-read copyright law to understand the difference between the collective copyrights and licenses applicable to various parts of a work and the copyright(s) and license(s) applicable to the work as a whole. If you hadn't been misrepresenting copyright law and the licenses in question we could both have avoided wasting time.
I still sense that you are under the impression that, if a project includes BSDcd-ed files and GPL-ed files and is licensed as a whole under GPL that it is licensed as a whole under both.
Just to make sure, do you understand that there could be cases where you have parts that are GPL and parts that are BSDcd, and the whole could legally be BSDcd?
Why does it concern Kevin Moore and/or Jim Matheos anyway?