Question on OSD #5

[Chris Travers]

On Dec 14, 2007 2:06 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:

> Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
> > Sounds like a good ticket. Matt, do you want to file it? :-)
>
> Every open source license already "allows private modifications." However
> some licenses, including OSL 3.0 and the new Affero GPL, require those
> private modifications to be treated as "distributions" under certain
> circumstances.


I have seen licenses which purport to require that anyone who modifies a
work send a patch back to the original developer.  If this is triggered on
any modification, then "private" modifications aren't so private anymore.
Neither the OSL nor the AGPL make such a requirement.  However the Cascade
Open Software License (or whatever it was that was brought up on the list a
couple weeks ago) purports to do this in a statement summarizing the license
even though it is not clear how the license aims to achieve that goal.

My own views are that forced distribution licenses such a the AGPL and the
OSL are problematic from a FOSS development perspective but I would not
quite go so far as to say they shouldn't be called "open source" (note that
no version of the AGPL appears in any list of OSI-approved licenses,
however).  I do think there are excellent reasons to avoid such licenses
however.  We should probably start a separate thread for that :-)



>
> Surely you don't want to prohibit those more aggressive
> reciprocal/copyleft
> licenses?
>

s/aggressive/coercive/    ;-)
No, I wouldn't go so far as to ban them.  I am content with speaking out as
to why they are problematic.  I would draw the line at any license which
requires private modifications to be distributed to the original
developers-- those should not be subject to OSI approval.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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