For Approval: MindTree Public License

[Mahesh T. Pai]

Sorry to have to reply to my own post!!

Mahesh T. Pai said on Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 01:49:49PM +0530,:

 > Shahnawaz Khan said on Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 11:54:17AM +0530,:
 > 
 >  > MindTree Consulting  Private Limited  ("MindTree") is the  owner of
 >  > the  Original Licensed  Software and  proposes to  permit  the use,
 >  > copy,
 > 
 > I am not sure how we missed this part in the earlier version.
 > 
 > IMHO, this is very vendor specific; I simply cannot apply this license
 > to my own code, which has no connection at all with MindTree code. 
 >  
 >  > Code of  the Modifications and  the Original Licensed  Software are
 >  > published under the terms of this MTPL or any future versions and
 > 
 > The GNU GPL and some other OSI approved licenses contain clauses which
 > make application  of future versions  of the license  *optional*. This
 > clause  makes the  application  of  the future  versions  of the  MTPL
 > automatic.
 > 
 > I  do  not think  any  court  of law  will  not  enforce ``any  future
 > versions''   of    the   license   automatically    to   pre-existing,
 > pre-distributed code. 
 > 

I  would clarify  that these  are  more drafting  issues, rather  than
issues of compliance with the OSD. 
 
When the  license asserts that  MindTree consulting is the  ``owner of
the  Original  Licensed  Software'',  it  discourages  an  independent
developer from using the license for his own work (that is, work which
has  no connection  at all  with work  created/modified/distributed by
MindTree.

For example, if  Tom Dick, the independent developer,  creates a spell
checker and applies this license to  the spell cheker, he will have to
assert that the original copyright holder is MindTree. 

While  there nothing in  the OSD  which explicitly  prohibits anything
like the above clauses in licenses,if  we intend to do anything at all
about license proliferation, we need to change the OSD to require that
licenses shall not be any specific to particular copyright holders.

Several of  the currently approved licenses. do  make such references,
and is  one of the primary reasons  why entities new to  the OSS world
prefer to brew their own licenses.

And I do  think that people brewing their  own licenses are justified,
in their endavours, because there  is nothing in the disclaimers which
are part of vendor-specific  licenses which exempt the re-distributors
/ modifiers of the s/w from product liability.

-- 
Mahesh T. Pai   ||  http://paivakil.blogspot.com
He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge --
who knows who has written and where it is to be found.
   --A.A. Hodge