Reusable Licenses Re: Three new proposed OSD terms
Ernest Prabhakar
prabhaka at apple.com
Thu Mar 3 18:38:26 UTC 2005
Okay, I've spent enough time complaining. Now let me do something
really stupid and try to suggest a constructive alternative.
I believe the OSI should prepare a short list of "Reusable Licenses"
which we recommend to any project wanting to adopt a new license.
These licenses should all either be generic, or written in template
form, so they can be trivially reused and approved. My (personal)
candidates for this list include:
- GPL & LGPL
- OSL & AFL
- One variant of the (non-advertising) BSD license
- The Common Public License
- The MPL (or equivalent: yeah, this is a fun one)
There may be more, but these are the ones I always seem to recommend to
my friends, so I think its a pretty good start.
I think the criteria for being on THIS list should be quite strict --
similar to what Russ proposed -- but not part of the OSD per se.
I believe other compliant licenses -- both old and new -- should
continue to receive OSD certification, and receive the full rights they
are currently entitled to. I personally (not speaking for my
employer) would even support a non-perjorative label like "Special
Purpose Licenses" to recognize licenses which do in fact conform to the
OSD, but are specific to a particular vendor or historical usage base.
This seems most in keeping with both the historical understanding of
the OSD, as well as the forward-looking purpose of OSI certitication.
Thoughts?
-- Ernie P.
(speaking for myself, not Apple)
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