The Ms-PL and Ms-CL licenses are arguably improvements to the BSD and MPL licenses. As part of their submission, they have to make that argument.
Some people want the Two-clause BSD license approved because a number of FreeBSD packages use it. Would you say that it is substantially different from the pre-existing Three-clause BSD license? Is the Three-clause BSD license substantially different from the four-clause BSD license (the one with the advertising requirement)?
There are so many licenses because there are so many people. People have different wishes and goals. People pursue different paths to the same goal, even. We can't STOP people from creating OSD-compatible licenses. All we can do is not approve them, which just pisses off the associated developers.
If you want to get rid of all the licenses, you have to get rid of all the developers, and shrink the community back to what it was in the pre-open-source era. I don't want to do that.
Indeed, just as we have gone through every other license with a fine-toothed comb[1] I invite you to join the process and subscribe to the license-discuss mailing list.
[1] Well, there was the APSL 1.0, but that was the impetus for making the license approval process a formal community effort.
But it's possible that, 8 years later, we might be able to change their minds. In the US, trademarks are established by use, not registration. Most people use Open Source in a compliant manner, so there's hope of having legal means of going after recalcitrant misusers.
Sheesh, where do people get this nonsense from?? We do NOT get paid to approve licenses!!
But yes, their abuse of our Open Source trademark was the issue. Yes, 'open source' was used before we estableshed a secondary meaning as a trademark; so what?
Are the journalists creating fear, uncertainty and doubt out of whole cloth? Or are they merely describing the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding a new, untried license which hopes to replace an older version of itself. The GPLv3 is the modern Oedipus.
You're correct. Git is the product of the Morris worm which, contrary to popular opinion, was never completely shut down. It has grown along with the Internet, and, being 19 years old now, has just finished its freshman year at MIT.
Why? We invented it, we defined it, we told people about it, we promoted it, it's our trademark. That's like me asking you to stop calling yourself CoderBob because of all the people named Robert who call themselves Coders. It's a completely absurd idea.
By the way, the law doesn't give a trademark holder the right to stop people from using a trademark accurately. So when you describe your open source software as Open Source, you are only telling the truth. You don't need our permission to tell the truth (thank God!)
Sigh. You're wasting our time. Just because somebody uses a phrase in a press release, that doesn't establish it as a trademark. If it had, then Bob Schiefler would own "Windows" because he used "Windows" when talking about X10 well before Microsoft introduced "Windows(R)".
Come back when you're done posting under a pseudonym. Quite clearly you feel free to encourage people to violate the law because (as I stated earlier) there are no consequences for you to do so.
OSI can do very little to keep a company from claiming to be open source.... .... a company is not inaccurate to claim their product is open source if, for example, they make the source available to the end user under a non-disclosure agreement.
Except that you have business practices to deal with. If a business mis-represents its product intending to profit, that's fraud. If a business claims that its software is Open Source, yet consumers expect software licensed under an OSI-approved license, and don't get what the business represented, that's fraud.
We've been continuously using the mark in commerce since June of 1999. We stopped actively claiming it to be a trademark, true. That would hurt us in court. Yet we have continued to act as if it were a trademark, we have continued to use it as a trademark, and the public largely recognizes it as a mark associated with a quality under our control (approved licenses).
Oh, I think the best way for you to get a date is to purchase the packet driver collection on a floppy disk, and give me an address to send it to. That way we'll have an address to serve process on. Or have you thought twice about disparaging our trademark? (Yes, I think I mean disparagement. Or are you meaning to confess to defamation instead?)
$15 to paypal.com@russnelson.com with your address.
Oh, accusing people who hide behind pseudonyms of breaking the law is fairly pointless. But since you insist, I insist and demand that you stop disparaging our trademark and remove your disparaging statements from Slashdot. that for a substantive response? Oh, and we were the first to use the mark in commerce in our field. I put it on my packet driver floppy disk distribution shortly after it was created. For only $15 you can get your own copy of our Official Evidence of First Use. Yes, it was in use in the intelligence community, and yes, one or two people used it to describe software, but nobody used it in commerce for software. Unless I'm wrong, of course, but you'd need evidence, not pseudothings.
No. Something can be open source without using Open Source branding. Just like something can be oatmeal without being Quaker Oats. We have a perfectly fine term for such software: free software.
How do people identify a set of desirable characteristic with a thing? The standard method is to use a brand name which by law may only be used by products that have those characteristics. The law further identifies an organization which decides whether the products have those characteristics. In this case, it's Open Source and the Open Source Initiative.
If you don't like that system, propose an alternative that has some chance of working. The one you seem to propose is "Well, just let anybody call anything Open Source because anything else wouldn't be Open". Under that regime I predict the rapid destruction of any meaning for "Open Source".
One always hopes so, but the misunderstand of people here is rather depressing. It's as if your hard work and our hard work in promoting Open Source has vanished. We're like the scaffolding that created the arch. People look at the arch and say "Oh, how beautiful" and forget that somebody had to work hard to create it.
Excepting, of course, that the analogy breaks down because people are trying to disassemble the arch and take it home, only without the scaffolding, there's no way to put it back together again. Break "Open Source" and you'll let the proprietary software vendors call ANYTHING open source.
Really, I'm flabbergasted by people's attempted repositioning of Open Source. It has *always* been a better name and better positioning of the SAME STUFF. Open Source is Free Software without the confusing two English meanings of "Free". Open Source is Free Software without St. Ignucius's religion and moralizing. The FSF says that you're unethical if you hoard your software. We (the OSI) don't judge you that way.
Well, that's a great legal theory, and it might have some weight with the court, but we established the trademark, and we promoted it, and you know what it means through our hard work. Now you're trying to take my work away from me? I don't think so. Open Source, when applied to software, means "software whose license complies with the Open Source Definition" as evinced by our listing of the license on our website.
If you don't like that, take it to a court and see how far you get.
Slashdot Mirror
The Ms-PL and Ms-CL licenses are arguably improvements to the BSD and MPL licenses. As part of their submission, they have to make that argument.
Some people want the Two-clause BSD license approved because a number of FreeBSD packages use it. Would you say that it is substantially different from the pre-existing Three-clause BSD license? Is the Three-clause BSD license substantially different from the four-clause BSD license (the one with the advertising requirement)?
There are so many licenses because there are so many people. People have different wishes and goals. People pursue different paths to the same goal, even. We can't STOP people from creating OSD-compatible licenses. All we can do is not approve them, which just pisses off the associated developers.
If you want to get rid of all the licenses, you have to get rid of all the developers, and shrink the community back to what it was in the pre-open-source era. I don't want to do that.
Indeed, just as we have gone through every other license with a fine-toothed comb[1] I invite you to join the process and subscribe to the license-discuss mailing list.
[1] Well, there was the APSL 1.0, but that was the impetus for making the license approval process a formal community effort.
They're not submitting the Limited versions of the licenses, not being COMPLETELY stupid or evil.
They're not submitting all of their licenses; only the Ms-CL and Ms-PL.
But it's possible that, 8 years later, we might be able to change their minds. In the US, trademarks are established by use, not registration. Most people use Open Source in a compliant manner, so there's hope of having legal means of going after recalcitrant misusers.
Sheesh, where do people get this nonsense from?? We do NOT get paid to approve licenses!!
But yes, their abuse of our Open Source trademark was the issue. Yes, 'open source' was used before we estableshed a secondary meaning as a trademark; so what?
Are the journalists creating fear, uncertainty and doubt out of whole cloth? Or are they merely describing the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding a new, untried license which hopes to replace an older version of itself. The GPLv3 is the modern Oedipus.
Linus doesn't even write code anymore.
You're correct. Git is the product of the Morris worm which, contrary to popular opinion, was never completely shut down. It has grown along with the Internet, and, being 19 years old now, has just finished its freshman year at MIT.
"Inheritive" is a better term for GPL-class licenses. After all, everybody would like an inheritance, wouldn't they?
Why do you think the GPLv2-licensed kernel puts ANY RESTRICTIONS on GPLv3 licensed applications? There's no relationship between them.
Harvard, actually, not "MIT-trained".
This story would be so much more interesting if Bennett wasn't an idiot. But then again, if he wasn't an idiot, there wouldn't be any story here.
Disclaimer: I've consulted for Goodmail, so I actually have some clue of what's going on here.
LA has had these laws for many years. Otherwise you'd have peple filming on public property everywhere.
Why? We invented it, we defined it, we told people about it, we promoted it, it's our trademark. That's like me asking you to stop calling yourself CoderBob because of all the people named Robert who call themselves Coders. It's a completely absurd idea.
By the way, the law doesn't give a trademark holder the right to stop people from using a trademark accurately. So when you describe your open source software as Open Source, you are only telling the truth. You don't need our permission to tell the truth (thank God!)
Sigh. You're wasting our time. Just because somebody uses a phrase in a press release, that doesn't establish it as a trademark. If it had, then Bob Schiefler would own "Windows" because he used "Windows" when talking about X10 well before Microsoft introduced "Windows(R)".
Come back when you're done posting under a pseudonym. Quite clearly you feel free to encourage people to violate the law because (as I stated earlier) there are no consequences for you to do so.
Except that you have business practices to deal with. If a business mis-represents its product intending to profit, that's fraud. If a business claims that its software is Open Source, yet consumers expect software licensed under an OSI-approved license, and don't get what the business represented, that's fraud.
We've been continuously using the mark in commerce since June of 1999. We stopped actively claiming it to be a trademark, true. That would hurt us in court. Yet we have continued to act as if it were a trademark, we have continued to use it as a trademark, and the public largely recognizes it as a mark associated with a quality under our control (approved licenses).
Oh, I think the best way for you to get a date is to purchase the packet driver collection on a floppy disk, and give me an address to send it to. That way we'll have an address to serve process on. Or have you thought twice about disparaging our trademark? (Yes, I think I mean disparagement. Or are you meaning to confess to defamation instead?)
$15 to paypal.com@russnelson.com with your address.
Oh, accusing people who hide behind pseudonyms of breaking the law is fairly pointless. But since you insist, I insist and demand that you stop disparaging our trademark and remove your disparaging statements from Slashdot. that for a substantive response? Oh, and we were the first to use the mark in commerce in our field. I put it on my packet driver floppy disk distribution shortly after it was created. For only $15 you can get your own copy of our Official Evidence of First Use. Yes, it was in use in the intelligence community, and yes, one or two people used it to describe software, but nobody used it in commerce for software. Unless I'm wrong, of course, but you'd need evidence, not pseudothings.
No. Something can be open source without using Open Source branding. Just like something can be oatmeal without being Quaker Oats. We have a perfectly fine term for such software: free software.
How do people identify a set of desirable characteristic with a thing? The standard method is to use a brand name which by law may only be used by products that have those characteristics. The law further identifies an organization which decides whether the products have those characteristics. In this case, it's Open Source and the Open Source Initiative.
If you don't like that system, propose an alternative that has some chance of working. The one you seem to propose is "Well, just let anybody call anything Open Source because anything else wouldn't be Open". Under that regime I predict the rapid destruction of any meaning for "Open Source".
Pseudonyms think pseudothings.
One always hopes so, but the misunderstand of people here is rather depressing. It's as if your hard work and our hard work in promoting Open Source has vanished. We're like the scaffolding that created the arch. People look at the arch and say "Oh, how beautiful" and forget that somebody had to work hard to create it.
Excepting, of course, that the analogy breaks down because people are trying to disassemble the arch and take it home, only without the scaffolding, there's no way to put it back together again. Break "Open Source" and you'll let the proprietary software vendors call ANYTHING open source.
Here, here! Now here's a fellow who understands the value of the name "Open Source".
Really, I'm flabbergasted by people's attempted repositioning of Open Source. It has *always* been a better name and better positioning of the SAME STUFF. Open Source is Free Software without the confusing two English meanings of "Free". Open Source is Free Software without St. Ignucius's religion and moralizing. The FSF says that you're unethical if you hoard your software. We (the OSI) don't judge you that way.
Well, that's a great legal theory, and it might have some weight with the court, but we established the trademark, and we promoted it, and you know what it means through our hard work. Now you're trying to take my work away from me? I don't think so. Open Source, when applied to software, means "software whose license complies with the Open Source Definition" as evinced by our listing of the license on our website.
If you don't like that, take it to a court and see how far you get.