For Approval: Open-Realty License

[John Cowan]

A private correspondent who wishes to be anonymous on this list (and
has granted permission to quote him) writes:

> The proposed licence has an additional restriction which, I believe,
> makes it FSF incompatible.
> 
> That restriction appears to be a restriction on use to me.  It seems to go
> beyond simple declaration of copyright and more like an advertising clause.

Advertising clauses aren't incompatible with FSF-freeness, though they are
incompatible with the GPL.  For example, the original (4-clause) BSD license
and the Apache 1.x licenses have advertising clauses of various kinds,
and they are FSF-free and GPL-incompatible.

> There also seems a conflict between any OSD downstream licence and the
> requirement for the HTML comment in derived works.  I don't think it has
> been well drafted.

I think this comes under the general exception for attribution notices.

> Incidentally, I also think that the URL should be provided using a link
> element!

Good idea.

-- 
John Cowan      jcowan at reutershealth.com        http://www.reutershealth.com
        "Not to know The Smiths is not to know K.X.U."  --K.X.U.