License Approval Process

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Michael Stutz wrote:

> > Is it *possible* for a license to be compatible with another? Offhand
> > I can think of just two possibilities for the GPL: the LGPL, and code
> > that has no license and is in the public domain.

On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 07:35:57PM -0500, jcmason at uwaterloo.ca wrote:

> It's certainly possible.  The GPL is particularly restrictive in this
> sense.

<soapbox>
Contrary to popular belief, "free speech" (as RMS describes it) is not
the same as "free time".  "Free time" has no strings attached, whereas
"free speech" has implied responsibilities.  Unfortunately, the FSF
have never AFAIK noted that English has at least _three_ definitions of
the word "free", which makes the term "free software" that much more
confusing.
</soapbox>

> What I would like to see as a variation of the GPL is one which allows
> modifications to be placed under any certified Open Source license (this
> is assuming a good certification process, which is being called into
> question).  I think this would make a good license to allow your code to
> be used with the maximum amount of open source software, but still
> disallow closed source software.  (This would be a middle ground between
> the GPL and the LGPL.)

This sounds like inserting another condition into the MIT licence would
do the trick.  I'm not good at legal wording, but how about this?

	Any distributed or published work which is, in whole or in
	part, derived from the Software shall be licensed as a whole
	under an OSI Certified Open Source licence.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage