OVPL vote results

[Russell Nelson]

The OSI board has, with some reluctance, decided not to approve the
Open Vendor Public License (OVPL).  The OVPL has some desirable terms
in it which address concerns about Australian law (the liability and
warranty exclusions) which are clearly within the strictures of the
Open Source Definition and are improvements over the CDDL.  We hope
that Sun also sees these terms as improvements and encourage them to
add them to the next revision of the CDDL.

The other terms, related to the mandatory grant-back, we are less
comfortable with.  The grant-back creates a situation that
discriminates against parties who wish to make their own distribution
of OVPL-licensed code.  These parties can never be an "Original
Contributor".  No matter how large their contribution, they will
always be required to give their code back to the Original
Contributor.  This, we adjudge, violates the "No Discrimination
against persons or groups of persons" term of the Open Source
Definition.

It is unfortunate that some licenses which almost exactly comply with
the open source definition will not gain our approval.  There must be
a line somewhere, and after careful and thoughtful review we find that
clause 5 of the OSD requires that we draw that line between the OVPL
and OSI certification.

We encourage everyone to release as much of their source code under
whatever terms they are comfortable.  They could call it Shared Source
as Microsoft does.  We encourage the use of the term "Source
Available" software since the source is available but not open for all
uses.

-- 
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