General problems with licenses listed

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 11:37:11PM -0500, Jeffrey Drake (jpt.d at rogers.com) wrote:
> 
> Many of the licenses that are approved seem to have specific properties 
> about them.
> 
> For example the opening to the W3C license:
> Copyright © 1994-2001 World Wide Web Consortium, (Massachusetts 
> Institute of Technology, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique 
> et en Automatique, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. 
> http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/
> 
> This opening I believe is inappropriate to be used in a general
> project that might use this license. If the project changes this, then
> it ceases to be the license approved by the opensource.org website.

The copyright notice of the license of itself needn't restrict use of
the license by other projects.  Other aspects of licensing my be
limiting or specific.

> Other examples similar to this exist. Such as Motosoto license, Apache
> license, Sleepycat, and Vovida. Others may exist.
> 
> Shouldn't these licenses be approved as removing any company specific
> copyright notice or other entries?

This depends on your goals.

The OSI doesn't certify licenses as being suitable for general use.  It
certifies them as being compliant with the Open Source Definition.

That said, there are other reasonable arguments to be made for producing
licenses which have various compatibility attributes, including use by
other organizations, or compatibility with other licenses (the BSD/MIT
and GPL licenses being the most likely and useful examples).

> Sun does pretty much this, so does BSD and MIT.
> 
> So I believe that any license submitted should be non-party specific
> in a templated form.

I agree that this is a _desireable_ goal (and frequently comment on this
issue).  It is not _necessary_ for the purposes of OSI certification,
however.

Peace.

IANAL, TINLA, YADA.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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