OSI Turns Down 4 Licenses; Approves Python Foundation's 154
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."
Re:WhooHoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not denying that it fills a gap, but a cursory reading of the license doesn't seem to indicate to me what gap it's filling. Why was it not possible/desirable to license Python under one of the existing Free Software licenses, and instead necessary to come up with another one?
Re:WhooHoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the Python source code was, at various times, "owned" (copyright was in the name of) Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, BeOpen, Digital Creations, and the Python Software Foundation.
Guido couldn't release it under the GPL, because it wasn't entirely "his" software to license.
(Google cache of the license [google.com])
A Good License (Score:3, Interesting)
(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.