OSD#5 needs a patch?

[Chuck Swiger]

On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 01:20 PM, Lawrence E. Rosen wrote:
> Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> Someone recently made a comment that the GPL will always be
>> an OSD-approved license regardless of what the actual definitions 
>> are; if
>> true, what does this imply if there exists privileged licenses that 
>> are not being
>> evaluated on their merits against the OSD definitions as they are 
>> written?
>
> Actually, what I intended to convey was the notion that the OSD has 
> always
> been consistent with the GPL in the past, and we would not want to 
> change
> the OSD in such a way that it invalidated the GPL.

If it's okay to change to OSD to invalidate, say, the Mozilla license, 
or the APSL, but is not okay to invalidate the GPL, then the OSD is no 
longer neutral.  But if your statement would also be true if you 
replaced "GPL" with the "BSD license", or the "MIT license", or any 
other widely-recognized open source license, then I would be more 
comfortable with such changes.

> That doesn't make the GPL a privileged license, although you would 
> have to
>  acknowledge that a license that applies to the vast majority of open 
> source software
>  is privileged in some way.  :-)

"vast majority"?

Hmm.  Most of the open source software that I use is BSD, MIT, or 
APSL'ed, although if I ran fewer FreeBSD and Mac systems, and more 
Linux boxes, perhaps my perspective would be a little different.  By 
another standard, a quick look suggests a little more than half of the 
SourceForge projects are GPL'ed.

[ ... ]
> That is exactly why we are discussing this problem now.  If
> Sean's license, and the GPL, are not discriminatory, then let's define
> things in such a way that we're clear about it.  And if they *are*
> discriminatory, then let's define things in such a way that such forms 
> of
> discrimination are OSD-compliant.

Well said.  The term discrimination used to reflect a meaning of 
"exercising good judgement in choosing between alternatives" rather 
than today's politically correct definition of "exhibiting prejudice".  
The OSD and OSD-approved licenses should not exhibit prejudice.

-- 
-Chuck

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