RPL 1.5 discussion
Chuck Swiger
chuck at codefab.com
Tue Sep 18 23:04:04 UTC 2007
On Sep 18, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Scott Shattuck wrote:
> I'd like to second William's request and respectfully ask that the
> RPL 1.5 be summarily approved at the next board meeting.
Russ doesn't track license submissions without "For approval:" in the
Subject header, but I agree that the original submission should have
received more attention.
> Revisions to the RPL v1.1 (originally approved in November of 2002)
> were submitted in April of 2006, largely in response to objections
> raised by the FSF when they noted that the RPL was the only
> software license that was both OSI-approved and "non-free".
Agreed-- one of the two big concerns I have over the RPL is the
notion that you can't run your own modified version of the software
without having to redistribute your changes, which is why the FSF
considers it "non-free". The exception for "personal use" in 1.11
restricts private commercial use unless one publishes those changes
to the world. This isn't strictly against the OSD #6, but it is
coming closer than most copyleft licenses do.
The second concern I have is that the RPL tries to claim it applies
not just to derivative works but potentially to a completely separate
application which was written from the ground up which merely
communicates over the network to an RPL'ed application. Using
publicly published APIs to talk to your RPL'ed program from separate
code I've written myself does not mean my code must be licensed under
your terms.
This isn't something which is against any part of the Open-Source
Definition, but it's unfortunate nevertheless. I don't want to
recommend against approval, but neither do I feel that the license is
solidly grounded in the claims it asserts...
--
-Chuck
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list