License Committee Report for July 2007

Michael Poole mdpoole at troilus.org
Tue Jul 31 01:30:20 UTC 2007


Timothy McIntyre writes:

> The OSI, to its credit, requires compliance with the following procedures, in
> order to have a license approved:
>
> http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.html#approval
>
> This ensures that the community has an opportunity to thoroughly "vet" a
> proposed license before it is OSI-approved.

Microsoft thanks you, I am sure, for your efforts to make open source
software stiflingly bureaucratic and stupidly myopic.

It is absolutely not to OSI's credit to require compliance to those
particular procedures when the license is a successor to one of the
most widely used open source licenses in the world.

But, fine, if you want to go down the checklist:

1. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html (GPLv3),
   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html (LGPLv3)

2. These licenses are most similar to the GPLv2 and LGPLv2
   respectively.  There are a variety of ambiguities and weaknesses in
   the prior versions' copyleft that the new versions attempt to
   address.  I did not change anything in these licenses.

3. The suggested usage of prior versions of these licenses are
   forward-compatible with these versions: works licensed "under the
   GPL version 2, or at your option, any later version" may be
   modified, distributed, etc, under the terms of GPLv3.  Likewise for
   prior LGPLed code.  Works under LGPLvN (for a given N) may also be
   converted to use the GPLvN license.

4. cc'ed.  I am identifying myself hereby.  If an OSI license approval
   person wants to identify me to license-discuss again, I have no
   objection.

Michael Poole



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