License Committee report

[Ben Reser]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 08:20:49PM -0500, Russell Nelson wrote:

> There is much discussion spent deciding whether NASA can copyright
> software at all.  The license itself says that no copyright is claimed
> in the United States.
> 
> The only serious concern that I can see is that the license requires
> the recipient to indemnify the Government of the United States against
> third party lawsuits.

I disagree.  I raised two potentially problems that I saw with the
license where it had vageness issues that could cause it to not meet the
OSD.  See:
http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:7720:200402:jfdgbalgdhgblndpmljm

I think the mere aggregation problem I raised is probably the clearest
of the issues.

I don't think either of these issues are by intent.  I think they're on
accident and some minor modifications could fix them.


> Title: NASA Open Source Agreement Version 1.1
> Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:7698:200402:jfdgbalgdhgblndpmljm
> License: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Research/Software/Open-Source/NASA_Open_Source_Agreement_1.1.txt
> Comments: ongoing as of this writing.
> Recommend: more discussion.


-- 
Ben Reser <ben at reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org

"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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