[License-discuss] proposal to revise and slightly reorganize the OSI licensing pages

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:39:06PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> 
> Anyway, as I just got through saying to Ben Tilly:   (1) People
> can and do perform pretty much whatever screwball actions they wish to
> perform with their own property.  (2) You should take care to understand
> all of the implications of any licence you use, because somebody else
> definitely may, and you'll look really silly acting surprised.
> 
> When people start talking about the 'finite pool of open source
> developers' on account of the unfortunate-for-the-speaker fact that some
> of those developers choose to do something the speaker dislikes (but
> that is lawful), I gently direct the speaker's attention to point #1.
> I.e., get used to the idea that that 'finite pool' are not your staff
> and are unlikely to do your bidding, unless perhaps you intend to hire
> them.

I'm not particularly interested in the way the two of you are dancing
around the subject of who's on what side of which ring (boxing or circus,
whatever), but I figure it might be worth pointing out that I'm pretty
sure nobody's claiming these hypothetical open source developers are
anyone's staff, or complaining directly about them doing something legal.
Rather, I think the complaint is about people making hypocritical
statements about exactly the kind of behavior they exhibit with regard to
source code appropriation, and about people pretending there is no
difference between two different edge cases of license effects when, in
fact, there is a difference.  This may be getting buried under the
language of disapproval.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]