I'd love a change of topic -- me too

[Seth Alan Woolley]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 01:19:24AM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> 
> >It leaves me curious, though -- I really want to know, besides "too many 
> >lawyers" what exactly Bruce wants to sway within the committee.
> >  
> >
> I need some time to write it all up and will present it on my own web
> site. I have thought about this issue for a long time, and have
> implemented some of the solution for my own customers. It is well
> recieved at Fortune 100 companies, and I think RMS would approve of it too.

I look forward to it.

> 
> >In the meantime, somebody's gone through immense effort to propose a 
> >license that's been proposed a couple times with five or six different 
> >proddings.  I don't care what the ideologues think -- if it meets the 
> >criteria without a templatable equivalent, you should approve it.
> >  
> >
> Until there are 100. And then 1000. Surely you see the problem.

I see the problem, but I mentioned "templatable equivalent".  By 
equivalent I mean not having a substantive difference that lawyers (i.e., 
this committee) would care about.  Perhaps the following wording is more 
appropriate: If there's a meaningful niche for a specific license while 
meeting all previously established criteria, it should be approved.

The creative commons project made a whole bunch of licenses based on a 
matrix -- I don't consider that too complex -- nobody thinks about the 
licenses unless they want to reuse the material, and everything comes 
with a long wordy license these days.

I think making approval subject to revocation is something to be 
considered.  The criteria might change with the times.  You can even 
give certain licenses a temporary approval, or even a "we don't approve, 
but it meets the criteria" approval.  Call it "Open Source Compatible" 
and "Open Source Approved" or something like that.  I think what end 
users really want is to know if it meets the criteria without having to 
read the license.  Open Source Compatible can do that.  Perhaps the 
problem is simply one of not enough resolution.  You don't even need to 
advertize the Open Source Compatible licenses -- they just link to the 
compatibility seal ala verisign.  The situation seems to need outside 
the box thinking (and I hope Bruce has that festering in his mind for 
his website presentation).  The FSF doesn't seem to have this license 
proliferation problem.  They just got enough questions and wrote about 
what's GPL compatible or not.  Surely this isn't as big a problem some 
people are making it out to be.

Seth

> 
>     Thanks
> 
>     Bruce
> 

-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Quality Assurance Team Leader & Security Team: Source Mage GNU/linux
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
Secretary Pacific Green Party of Oregon http://www.pacificgreens.org
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