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."

Yep thats great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can have 6 licenses for my open source project.

Re:Hypocrisy

[Trepidity]

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.

WhooHoo!

[Arandir]

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.

Re:Let's name some more names...

[Fnkmaster]

The CMGPL is, well, stupid. They should just use the LGPL if they want to allow linking to proprietary apps. Duh. And axing the preamble? Why bother?

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

what about all the dozens of licenses they have
IGNORED in the past 2 years?

if you have big $, OSI will grant approval. if not, you will be ignored.

Re:GPL

[uslinux.net]

I'd like to see one more license added to those two. A good commercial one which allows you to modify the hell out of the source code, but when doesn't allow you to distribute the changes outside your organization. I really think THAT is what is keeping a number of companies from writing open source code (free as in speech, not beer). Of course, that wouldn't be an OSI-approved license, but it would encourage companies to open their code, which is the first step towards building truly Open products.

I personally don't have a problem with companies restricting redistribution of code (eg. forcing others to purchase it), so long as once you've purchased it, you get the source and can modify it (or distribute the patches to others who have purchased it). My *guess*, however, is that many companies are afraid they'll be forced to support software others modify if they give out the code.

Re:GPL

[ajs]

No, there are a great many other documents, objects and other "items" which are owned by the FSF and are not covered by the GPL.

The GPL is a tool which was created with one goal: to allow modification and distribution of software. The goal was not (even given the FSF's fondness for recursion) to allow modification of the GPL.