License Committee Report for July 2007

[Radcliffe, Mark]

As General Counsel of OSI, I agree with Rick. Simply because it is the
"successor" to a widely used license does not mean that it should be
given an automatic approval. In fact, the GPLv3 is quite different from
GPLv2 and deserves a standard review. 

Since I was the Chair of Committee C and spent many hours in proposing
changes to the draft, I have a lot invested in the success of GPLv3 and
I am confident that it will pass the review, but we should not short
circuit the process merely because it is a "successor". For a summary of
the differences, you can see my blog:
http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/  

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Moen [mailto:rick at linuxmafia.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 6:51 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: License Committee Report for July 2007

Quoting Michael Poole (mdpoole at troilus.org):

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

Thus polluting our meme pool with a particularly moronic and annoying
advocacy troll.   Why, thank you, Michael!

> 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.

Half-assed comparison (except for your concluding sentence, which,
arguably, _is_, in the context of the question, fully ass-enabled for
the enterprise, as an answer to "If your proposed license is derived
from a license we have already approved, describe exactly what you have
changed").  A proper submission would list major points of change, not
just wave your hands wildly.

> 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.

An almost 100% total success at failing to cover licence compatibility.

> 4. cc'ed.

Was some particular part of "send your proposed licence by e-mail to
license-approval at opensource.org" unclear?


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