Open Source Licenses

[John Cowan]

On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Brendan de Bruijn wrote:

> I am slightly confused about the various types of licenses that
> are accredited by OSI, especially as the GNU people explicitly discredit
> some of these licenses on their website
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html.

Naturally.  The OSI and the FSF are two different organizations, and
the common idea they both promote ("open source software" to the OSI,
"free software" to the FSF) is defined slightly differently by each
organization.  About the core licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT/X) there is
no dispute.

> In the project, we are
> trying to establish what the legal hurdles of Open Source Licenses are,
> especially regarding liablility in the event of things 'breaking'. Is the
> common 'Warranty' displayed at the end of a license enough to cover this?

So we hope, but asking a lawyer in your jurisdiction is the first step.
Remember that as far as anyone knows, no open source license has ever
had a court test.

In any case, in some jurisdictions there are implied warranties that can't
be disclaimed.

> We are also trying to figure out how one determines what the most
> appropriate license in a certain situation is; for this reason I am trying
> to compile a list of 'essential components' that need to be covered in a
> license. So far I have come up with: 1.copying/redistribution, 2.
> modification/redistribution and 3.warranty; would you say these are the
> three main components that need to be covered in an 'Open Source' license'?

Check the Open Source Definition, which says what a license must have in
order to be open source:  http://www.opensource.org/osd.html .

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan at ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
	--Douglas Hofstadter