[CAVO] [License-review] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval

[Lawrence Rosen]

Heather Meeker wrote:
> If there is a difference, it would be a matter of national security or
> necessity of public interest that is not embodied in any law. 
> I would expect that to be rare, but the clarification was important
> to our constituency.  

Now we get to policy issues that seriously concern me. 

What are these necessities of public interest that are NOT embodied in law? Why should those ambiguous (so-called) national security or public interests affect source or binary FOSS code in any way? These are OUR elections we're talking about. There is enormous fear about OUR elections software being restricted or abused for private reasons. There is an important element of trust that certain FOSS licenses can help provide.

That is why open source elections solutions are so critical to all of us. That is why FOSS licenses matter for this solution stack.

While it is true that the OSET license may be approved by OSI, it does not mean that we should ever allow elections software to be affected by vague "national security or necessity of public interest" that our legislatures don't put into law.

When they DO put it into law, of course, we'll all obey it regardless of what our copyright licenses say. 

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Meeker, Heather J. [mailto:hmeeker at omm.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 7, 2015 11:01 AM
To: Josh Berkus <josh at postgresql.org>; License submissions for OSI review <license-review at opensource.org>
Subject: Re: [License-review] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval

I was sidetracked because Section 4 is, for the most part, already in MPL 2.0 (whereas 3.5B is the new language we added).  In Section 4, we added "national security or necessity of public interest" to "statute, judicial order, or regulation."  So if there is a concern generally with this mechanism, it also exists for MPL 2.0.  If there is a difference, it would be a matter of national security or necessity of public interest that is not embodied in any law.  I would expect that to be rare, but the clarification was important to our constituency.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Berkus [mailto:josh at postgresql.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 2:58 PM
To: Meeker, Heather J.; License submissions for OSI review
Cc: Gregory Miller; John Sebes; christine at osetfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [License-review] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval

On 09/03/2015 02:49 PM, Meeker, Heather J. wrote:
> 2. Ability to adjust terms downstream
> This provision says you can "place additional conditions on the right granted" and that would not include additional grants of rights or waiver of conditions.  That distinction may sound like a legal technicality, but in open source licensing there is an important difference between license conditions -- which narrow a grant of rights -- and granting additional rights or removing conditions.  For example, in most copyleft licenses, you cannot place additional conditions on the exercise of the license at all, or remove any condition.   Our variation is actually very narrow -- only as required by law.  I take your point that states can pass crazy laws.  But if a law says a state can't use the software for elections except with restriction X, and the license (such as GPL) says you can't impose restriction X, then the state cannot use the software at all, and we are trying to avoid this result.

Um ... no?

I'm talking about clause 4, 4. Inability to Comply Due to Statue or Regulation.  This quite clearly allows recipients to waive some or all of the license provisions.

--Josh Berkus
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