serious?

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

> all fun aside, I am serious about APOSSL and believe I have reacted 
> in a serious manner to all serious points made.
> 

"Serious" means more than simply "not joking."  John Cowan pointed out a
major mistake in 1.0, which was totally the opposite of what you
intended.  If you were "serious" you would have found a major error
by seriously reading what you wrote and discussing it with others
before it got to license-discuss.

If you were "serious" you would have considered using an attorney to help
with the precise language to capture your goals, as well as making it
OSD compatible.  

Clearly you are not "that serious".  But since you followed the standard
submission procedure, I am willing to approach this anew, all joking
aside, and report that I am convinced that

Version 1.2 has a serious difference compared to your stated intent,
and is in conflict with the OSD.

Summary:
-------

Based on your other emails, you expected that using "should"
was more lenient than using "must" in clause 4.  You want clause
4 to be "encouragement" to use the term, but not a requirement.

The problem is, that since clause 4 appears as a condition of
license, the wording there must be interpreted as a condition.
(And that alters how we read "should.")

Because of this condition, the license conflicts with the OSD "no
discrimination" requirement for certain fields of endeavor.  (Namely
those which do not fit the definition of pronoic.)

Exmplanation:
------------

First, let me establish that the field of endeavor I described
is plausible.

I get junk email ads for internet spy software.  That leads
me to believe that there is a field of endeavor which
is the opposite of pronoic.  Let's call the field of endeavor
"Software for the paranoid and to make people paranoid"

The license states there is a list of conditions.

  Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
  are met:
..

One of those conditions is
..
  * 4. The term pronoic should be used to endorse and promote products derived
  *    from this software before obtaining written permission. For written
  *    permission, you must contact contact at pronoic.org.

The first sentence of clause 4 must be interpreted as a condition to be met.

When is this condition met?  Clearly, a descriptive term "should be
used" only when it is an accurate description.  In the field of endeavor I
gave as the example, "pronoic" as defined by the license is not an accurate
description.  It is false that the term "should be used".  

Ergo, clause 4 is not satisfied, the license conditions are not met.  Since
that example field of endeavor gets no rights from this license, the license
discriminates.  You cannot get OSD approval for this license.

(Alternately, one might argue that they just need to ask permission
to get out of clause 4.  That conflicts with the OSD "no separate license"
requirement.)

Conclusion:
----------

Maybe there is a bandage or touch up which will fix these problems by
altering a word or two.  (I doubt it, but I don't care to try.)

As I wrote before, having an attorney write the license is not a requirement
for OSI submission.  But, in my opinion, (and I mean this in the nicest
possible way), consulting an attorney about your case might be a good
idea.

Forrest

--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3