YAPL is bad (was: Re: Backlog assistance?)

[Russell Nelson]

Rick Moen writes:
 > begin Karsten M. Self quotation:
 > 
 > > As well it should be.  OSI blundered horribly with the APSL.
 > 
 > I think the Board should mull decertification, and privately suggest that
 > Apple Computer amend the licence to remove the objectionable publication 
 > clause, to avert that step.

I don't think that is what Karsten is talking about.  He's talking
about APSL 1.0, which required that every licensee, whether subject to
U.S. law or not, abide by U.S. patent law.  This applied even to
sub-licensees distributing code from one non-US country to another
non-US country.  And yeah, we screwed up badly, which is one of the
reasons why we created this mailing list.

RMS doesn't like APSL 1.2 for reasons extraneous to free software
concerns.  He gets to do that, because he has no written definition
for "free software".  He can make it up as he goes along, and in this
case he's created a privacy requirement from whole cloth.  There's
nothing in the OSD which talks about privacy, so we cannot consider it
as a requirement, no matter how much Rick Moen, RMS, or anybody else
with initials containing "R" and "M" objects to it.

Now, if you think we should include a privacy requirement, propose
changes to the OSD, or figure out how we can use existing language to
make it happen.  For good legal reasons and for obvious reasons of
fairness, and to comply with the rule of law, we have to treat
everybody the same, and we have to judge everybody under the law they
understood to be current.

Personally, I don't see what's so horrible about the publication
step.  You've already published the software internal to your
organization.  Unless you're the NSA or CIA, what's the problem with
having to tell the licensor how to get the modifications?  Doesn't
that increase the amount of open source software available to people?

-- 
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