Change ot topic, back to OVPL

[Russell Nelson]

Brian Behlendorf writes:
 > On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Russell Nelson wrote:
 > > Do any license-discuss readers disagree with me?
 > 
 > I disagree with requirements for certification that go beyond conformance 
 > to the letter and spirit of OSD.  Alex is right - you didn't make Sun go 
 > get the MPL fixed.

They told us that they had tried to engage the Mozilla Foundation to
make changes.  The important part here is not that the changes are
necessarily made, but instead that everyone understand the license
proliferation problem.  A license is written once and read many
times.  But a license is not read out of context.  If you're a company
that takes copyright seriously, then you're going to have *somebody*
(lawyer or not) read the licenses.  If you can read and understand a
term in one license, and then see that the term is identically present
in another license, that greatly reduces the cost of understanding
that license.

I'm asking for verbatim code reuse.
Alex wants to renumber the code he's gotten so it looks "sensible".

He would be excoriated for having done so by the next person who had
to read his code.  Of course we don't have syntactically-significant
line numbers anymore, but the idea has its modern expression: changing
the indentation, renaming variables and functions, reformatting
comments, etc.

I see the principle you're trying to work with here: if it complies
with the OSD, it *is* open source.  The trouble here is that applying
no management creates a commons of "license understanding".  With
every license (cow) added to the commons, the grass gets thinner and
thinner.  Martin Fink (whom I pick on to personalize the debate, but
his view is common) is afraid that when there are one hundred open
source licenses, users will start to rebel.  Well, as a responsible
organization which claims to represent the interests of open source
users (and if you compile with gcc but have never compiled gcc, you
are sometimes a user), we have taken steps to head that off.

 > All this effort being poured into denying the OVPL 
 > certification would be better invested elsewhere, such as in license 
 > comparison documents, or the license selection wizards people have 
 > proposed or prototyped, or in culling dead licenses.  IMHO.

You're asking the right hand to ignore what the left hand is doing;
worse than that, you're asking the right hand to build what the left
hand is tearing down.

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