For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Philippe Verdy]

Chris Travers [mailto:chris.travers at gmail.com] wrote:
> That is exactly what will happen if dislike of the source of a license is
a factor in its approval.

Here again you continue to misread what I said. The "dislike" of a source is
not addressed in what I said, I thought I had been clear enough. I just
spoke about the applicability of users' rights and obligations, i.e. the
existence of unwritten, unexplicited clauses in the license, that can
severely weaken their applicability to users, i.e. (unwritten) *implicit*
rights and *implicit* requirements (that do exist just because one of the
parties may think that these rights or obligations are protected by their
national law, or implied by the terms used in the licence, or by the actual
coverage of meaning of the term "licence").

The problem is not *who* submits the licence (I don't care here if I like or
dislike the license submitter, this is *not* the subject of my concern
here), but *what* the licence covers; and consequently, the problem
translates into *who* can become a licensee and *how* they can enter into
such agreement without infringing any unagreed right or obligation (this
concerns directly the OSI, as this definition of rights and obligations
defines how far a licence can be said "open", if there are some classes of
users directly affected by such limitations of implicit rights or
obligations, in away that would prohibit them to become a valid licensee
under the terms of the license).

I am also not speaking much here about other legal rights and obligations:
these are *written* clauses, they are public and exist within laws, outside
of the licenses or contracts, they apply automatically on top of any licence
or contract, and in priority to any written clause that is part of the
license or contract, but their terms can change at any time and be completed
or removed, without affecting the applicability of the existing terms of the
licence or contrac; such legal exclusions may sometime have a retroactive
effect (within some extents explicated by laws), and this also concerns the
legal clauses about "public domain" or "fair use" or "right of citation",
that are not part of the terms of any contract or licence, and that only
exist because of national laws (and whose applicability is not universal as
they concern legally delimited classes of users).