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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ben Tilly (btilly at gmail.com):

> Seeing these repeated references to my name is getting annoying.  

This seems a little odd.  All I said was that I'd recently made that
observation to you -- which was factually correct and certainly not 
any offence to you or anyone else. 

> You like to take people to task who have assumed that you take one
> position or another which you don't.  

> Please stop assuming that you enlightened me....

Something I neither said nor implied.

> stop associating me with a position that I do not hold.

Nor this.

> Many people who choose permissive licenses have a view that says that
> when you don't try to order people around with contracts, goodwill
> tends to get repaid down the road.

I not only know this, but have written a number of essays pointing that
out.

> [...]  But in the eyes of the person who originally released
> the software, you have failed to be generous back to them, and you
> have created a barrier to future generosity from people down the road
> who use the improved version.  (Proprietary software creates less of a
> barrier because there is a single entity that may come to see
> generosity as being in their enlightened self-interest.)
> 
> Again I am not describing this to say that I hold this view, or that
> you should agree with it.  Quite the contrary.  I am merely offering
> it for anyone who wants to understand what may be going through the
> head of a person who gets upset about something like this.

I'm quite familiar with the viewpoint (and permissive-license
significant amounts of my own work for various reasons), but thank you.


> If a license does what I want 90% of the time quite well, and fails
> 10% of the time, is it better or worse than a license that does
> something you find merely OK 100% of the time?

Mu.  The premise is defective.

If the licence doesn't grant the rights you wish granted, then it is
defective 100% of the time.  

Failing to grant the rights you wish to grant might be evidenced by,
e.g., 10% of the recipients behaving in ways you intended to disallow,
but your chosen terms allowed this, and yet you are surprised.