de-recomendation of Larry Rosen's licenses/clarify web site

[lmajerus at speakeasy.net]

Evan and all,  

Larry Rosen has volunteered to "de-recommend" the earlier versions of his licenses in response to a call from the OSI license proliferation committee for people to voluntarily "re-commend" their own licenses. In other words, only an owner of a license can de-recommend it, not just anyone.

Our web master is a volunteer (thank you Steve!), and I will ask him to make the site clearer about what this means.  

You'll notice a similar disclaimer on the Intel Open Source License.  The Jabber Open Source License will get a disclaimer soon, as the Jabber folks voluntarily de-recomended it at Oscon.

Laura Majerus
OSI, Legal Affairs

-----Original Message-----
From: Evan Prodromou [mailto:evan at bad.dynu.ca] 
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2005 6:52 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Cc: webmaster at opensource.org
Subject: Unclear wording on the AFL disclaimer

I actually have no clue who handles the Web design on opensource.org, but I thought I might post a suggestion here.

I recently saw the following disclaimer on the AFL 2.1 page:

        Larry Rosen has ceased to use or recommend any version of the
        Academic Free License below version 2.1

        http://www.opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.1.php

My read of this was:

        Larry Rosen does not recommend any version of the AFL, including
        the 2.1 version shown on this page after this disclaimer

After a couple of extra reads, I now think it means:

        Larry Rosen does not recommend any version of the AFL which has
        a version number less than 2.1

I suggest changing the wording to to the following:

        The license author, Larry Rosen, discourages the use of versions
        1.1, 1.2, and 2.0 of the Academic Free License, and recommends
        that copyright holders upgrade to version 2.1 immediately.

Strangely, the disclaimer _doesn't_ appear on either the AFL 2.0 or AFL
1.1 pages! So it should probably go on there, too.

Finally, a link to an explanation for why the earlier license versions are so flawed that they need this red-letter disclaimer might be useful.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou
evan at bad.dynu.ca
"By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." -- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"