BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process

[Philippe Verdy]

Ben Tilly [mailto:btilly at gmail.com] wrote:
> Envoyé : mercredi 17 octobre 2007 21:56
> À : Chris Travers
> Cc : License Discuss
> Objet : Re: BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process
> 
> On 10/17/07, Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/16/07, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > >
> > > So if the fact that they use "open source" terms for describing the
> licence
> > > does not matter. We are ONLY interested in the compatibility of the
> licence
> > > with our set of approved licences. And for me this is just enough,
> however
> > > IANAL...
> >
> > However, taking this viewpoint will effectively prevent the OSI from
> > asserting that non-OSI approved licenses should not be called open
> > source (as Mr Tiemann has argued in his blog).
> 
> Not so fast.
> 
> IANAL either, but it seems to me that if the copyright holder says,
> "My license is open source because it grants sufficient permissions to
> allow it to be relicensed as X", that statement itself is sufficient
> permission to allow someone to distribute under the terms of X.
> Therefore the software is now implicitly licensed as X and is
> effectively an open source license.

You don't understand: I mean that if a software writer wants to designate
its software as open source, he can do so without any legal consequence.
The only thing that is legally important is not the fact that its licence is
said to be "open source" (without any reference to OSI), but the fact that
the licence *asserts* as being compatible with another explicitly named
licence that you consider being "open source" (BSDL, MPL, GPL...).

One way a licence can do that is by explicitly granting the user to choose
between either the terms of the licence itself, or the terms of another
licence, including if the licence requires (in that case) to terminate the
licence at the same time as he chooses the alternate licence.

This is not like multiple licencing, where all licences apply
simultaneously, because the text clearly requires the user to choose
irrevocably between the two texts, and only one licence applies at any time.

I won't say the same thing about the term "copyleft" which was uniquely and
first defined by the FSF as necessarily meaning "GPL compatible", and
there's apparently no precedent (so the "copyleft" term is probably
defendable in a court by free software supporters, but IANAL to assert this
would be the case if "copyleft" has not be registered as a trademark by the
FSF, allowing it to forbid its usage by some licensor whose licence is not
compatible with the GPL).

I absolutely don't matter in fact about the terms. What I need and want is
ONLY making sure that the licence is compatible with some other well known
"open source" or "free" licence. And the job of the FSF and of the OSI is to
study if such licences are compatible with their rules.

Unfortunately, there exists licences that are considered compatible with OSI
rules (and approved by OSI) which are considered NOT compatible with the GPL
by the FSF (despite the GPL itself is compatible with OSI rules). This means
that the licence compatibility is NOT a transitive property, but only a
PARTIAL ORDER (like in a oriented graph, where NO shortcut is implicitly
allowed):

If licence A is said compatible with licence B which itself is said
compatible with licence C, this does not imply that licence A is compatible
with licence C. It does not imply also any reverse order.

This really complicated the things, and that's why avoiding the
proliferation of licences is highly wanted as it really fragments our
desired commons. And one way to reconcile things and reconsolidate this
licencing graph is by making licences that are EXPLICITLY said (in their OWN
text) to be compatible with several other wellknown licenses, or for
free/open source software makers to avoid writing their own licence by
providing their software with multiple licences (and providing a way to
contact them for getting supplementary licences if one of those proposed
licences are not satisfying for users, due to the difficulties of
integrating it with other software covered by one of the proliferating other
licences).