DRAFT: OSL version 3.0

[Sanjoy Mahajan]

Great to see that the OSL is alive and well and being revised.  Now's
my chance to feed in my accmulated comments on it...

> ...communicate to the public...

>From the EU report (p.15), I gathered that the right to communicate to
the public in EU law is similar (the same as?) to the right to display
in US law, which 1(e) grants.

- The EU report (table on p.34) says that dynamic linking does not
  invoke the OSL reciprocity provision.  Your book gave me the
  opposite impression.

- Collective works.  Some people (incorrectly) worry that the OSL
  virally covers other works in a collective work (e.g. unlike in the
  GPL, there's no explict discussion of collective works).  Should
  this worry be allayed by an explicit statement, like in the Creative
  Commons attribution-sharealike license (v2.5), para 4(a):

    The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective Work,
    but this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work
    itself to be made subject to the terms of this License.

- Para 6.  It requires retaining notices of licensing, but there's no
  explict requirment that the text of the OSL be included, at least in
  the source.  The GFDL and GPL require their respective license texts
  to be included (on the reasonable assumption that web pages are
  emphemeral).  The GFDL goes farther and says it must be included in
  the printed form, but that's too strong I think.  Is the solution
  that the original author include the OSL text in the source code,
  whereupon it will stay in derivative works?  Or should the inclusion
  be explicitly required by the license?

- Para 11.  To remove the reference to the US copyright act, how
  about:

    Any use of the Original Work outside the scope of this License or
    after its termination shall be subject to the requirements and
    penalties of domestic law, international law, and international
    treaty.

  But what's the purpose of this sentence?  You are subject to the law
  whether or not the license tells you so.

- Para 9.  I'd revise the proposed last sentence to:

    Upon Your failure to honor the proviso in Section 1(c) herein, this
    License shall terminate immediately and You may no longer exercise any
    of the rights granted to You by this License.

  The sentence before it talks about forming the contract.  So it is a
  a shock to read next: 'This License shall terminate immediately...'.
  The reader (at least this reader) stops to wonder what they did
  wrong.  Only by the end of the sentence do they find out the
  limitation (failure to follow 1(c)).  Hence I'd put the limitation
  early in the sentence.

  How do you get express assent and consideration to bind the contract
  when a book is purchased in a bookstore or from an online retailer
  such as Amazon?  Is paying for the book enough consideration?  Or do
  you have to also offer a full refund if a buyer rejects the
  contract?  A feature that many booksellers might not be happy about
  or agree to provide.

  Will getting assent and consideration interfere with, for example,
  distributed development?  Someone cannot checkout the source from a
  remote repository until they click on a license acceptance.  This
  isn't such a problem with mozilla, which also has a contract-based
  license, since it comes from one repository and they can design the
  download system to include license assent.  But for general
  development, people may want to have their own repositories and
  allow downloads via arch, cvs, monotone, etc.

  Physicists often place their papers on the arXiv preprint server
  <http://arxiv.org> by placing the TeX/LaTeX source from which the
  postscript or pdf file is generated.  I would do the same with the
  textbook, except that I don't control the click-wraps that arXiv
  offers when you download source (as of now, I don't think there are
  any).  The arXiv admins would have an administrative and legal
  nightmare if every document had its own license requiring assent
  (they'd have to make sure that each license was compatible with
  their own distribution policies, for example).

- Para 11.  If the OSL is being used for a book (a physical object),
  can the UN convention about sale of goods be excluded?

-Sanjoy