OSD#5 needs a patch?

Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. rdixon at cyberspaces.org
Thu Oct 9 23:06:13 UTC 2003


: Chuck Swiger <chuck at codefab.com> writes:
:
: > By this you mean that you do not see any particular problem with
: > Sean's license "being incompatible with the GPL by it's own terms",
: > and that you view his license as being OSD-compliant?
:
: Very few people thought that Sean's license was not OSD-compliant.  I
: can only recall one.  I argued against the license, but I said right
: from the start that I thought it was OSD-compliant.
:
: Much of the discussion was on the broader, and far more political,
: issue of whether the OSI should approve it even assuming that it was
: OSD-compliant.
:
: That is, is the OSI a neutral organization which just certifies that
: licenses meet the OSD, or is it the advocacy organization described on
: the opensource.org web page, one which is ``dedicated to managing and
: promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community,
: specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software
: certification mark and program.''
:
: Obviously there can be many disagreements over just what is ``the good
: of the community,'' but it may be that even before those
: disagreements, we need to settle the disagreement about what type of
: organization the OSI is.
:
: Ian
: --


This seems to me to be a good point. Unless I am missing something, I cannot
glean from the opensource website any other standard used in the
certification mark program other than OSD-compliance (posting on the list of
approved licenses seems ostensibly automatic once the OSI board agrees on
OSD-compliance). On the open source website it states that:

"Use of these marks for software that is not distributed under an OSI
approved license is an infringement of OSI's certification marks and is
against the law."

Consequently, perhaps for ease-of-use of the certification mark and to avoid
misuse of the mark, the determination whether a license is OSD-compliant is
the only pertinent issue.

-Rod




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