Get ready....

[Jacques Vidrine]

On 14 April 1999 at 20:52, "Derek J. Balling" <dredd at megacity.org> wrote:
[snip]
> I would FURTHER go so far as to allow alteration of the licenses, but that
> the "lineage" must be documented, so that people familiar with [for lack of
> a better term] the OSI-BSD license (whatever they come up with) can say,
> "Ah, this license from Acme is based on the BSD license, but they changed
> it somehow. How did they change it I wonder?" and then they'll find out via
> diff/etc.  They'll know all the rest of it as "tried and true" so to speak,
> and then dig down to the alterations that a particular company needed for
> their particular business model.
[snip]
> Does ANYONE agree with me here?

In spirit, perhaps I do.  However, I don't think that it is very sound
law practice to review license documents using ``diff'' :-)

My thought was that if OSI had these two boiler plate licenses, then
organizations could start from one of them.  Just using one as the
base document would not mean that the derived document would
automatically earn an Open Source Certification mark.  However, it
would certainly make it easier for OSI to determine whether a license
meets the requirements of an Open Source Certification mark.

In other words, having good starting licenses (which should be
complete in their own right, as is the GPL) will encourage
organizations to adopt them because:

1. It is less trouble and less confusing than reviewing the large
   number of ``Open Source'' licenses of today: GPL, BSD, X, Apache,
   Artistic, NPL, MPL, APSL, IBM's Jikes license, et. al.

2. Because adopting one of these licenses makes it easier to get
   the Open Source Certification mark (as the licenses would be
   familiar to OSI).

The OSC is crucial.  One should not be able to modify an Open Source
(cm) license, and claim that the derivative is Open Source (cm).

Jacques Vidrine / n at nectar.com / nectar at FreeBSD.org