License Committee Report for August 2007

[Jamey Hicks]

Hi Russ,

I am glad that the board has decided to include Open Source Hardware. I 
will be on vacation for the next 3 weeks but will post to the discussion 
list when I get back. We decided to use the MIT license for our project. 
I think one thing that would be helpful is for the board to consider the 
current open source licenses and to evaluate which ones would be usable 
for hardware projects. GPL, MIT, BSD all seem OK to me for hardware.

Jamey

ext Russ Nelson wrote:
> I'm the chair of the license approval committee.  This is my report
> from the board back to the committee.
>
>
> Title: Open Source Hardware License 
> Status: The board encourages more discussion, as Open Source Hardware
> falls within the remit of the Open Source Initiative.
>
> Title: GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3)
> Title: Lesser GNU General Public License v3 (LGPLv3)
> Status: The Open Source Initiative is pleased to announce that, based
> on broad review and acceptance by both the Board and the community, it
> has confirmed that GPLv3 and LGPLv3 both conform to the Open Source
> Definition. Note that new licenses containing "further restrictions"
> allowed by GPLv3 and LGPLv3 may not be conformant with the OSD, and
> thus will still require separate review and approval. Due to the
> dramatic differences between and viable communities around both the
> GPLv3 family and the GPLv2 family of licenses, we will not be marking
> GPLv2 and LGPLv2 as redundant, even thought they are technically
> superseded respectively by GPLv3 and LGPLv3.
>
> Title: Simple Public License (SimPL):
> Status: The board wants to know what the plan is with respect to the
> GPLv3.  In the interest of preserving as much compatibility between
> licenses, it would be nice if the SimPL allowed promotion to either
> the GPLv2 or GPLv3.
>
> Title: Non-Profit OSL 3.0
> Status: Passed Unanimously.
>
> Title: Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
> Status: Still under discussion
>
> Title: Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL)
> Status: Still under discussion
>
> Title: Simplified BSD License
> Status: Lost in process
>
>