[License-discuss] license committee

[John Cowan]

Bruce Perens scripsit:

> They would only be different if the organization became politically  
> capable to dis-recommend licenses.

Quite so.  I see no sign of that happening.  OSI, unlike FSF, has always
been seen as a neutral fact-finder.

> I think my favorite is probably still the SIL font license, where it  
> says "The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not  
> apply to any document created using the Font Software." As far as I can  
> tell, that allows you to convert a font to any license or no license,  
> and then extract it again, and the SIL license doesn't magically come 
> back.

Fonts are not documents.  What's meant is that the license doesn't apply
to a document created using the font.  Even if you put a full type specimen
into a document and then extracted the characters from it, you'd wind up
with a font again and the SIL would apply.

-- 
John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
        Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
        analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
                --E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale