[License-discuss] [License-review] CC0 incompliant with OSD on patents, [was: MXM compared to CC0 ]

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Jagielski (jim at jimjag.com):

> I certainly did not intend to imply you had...

No problem; just taking care to be clear.

As an afterthought, OSI _might_ decide to adopt a policy that all new
licences should at least not disclaim/waive any implicit patent waiver
that might be created against patents held by licensor (estoppel defence)
-- or establish some other minimum requirement on that subject.  

If so, it might address your rhetorical question[1] as follows:
Patents are increasingly important concern in open source and can
threaten otherwise open source codebases more than any other current
threat.  There is almost vanishingly little OSI can practically do to
address that subject (especially as to third-party patents) as part of
its mission to ensure that OSI Certified licences really convey the
intended freedoms in usable form, but it can at least set a bare minimum
floor as to the licences' terms themselves.  Unlike other methods to
render a codebase artificially proprietary despite licensing, such as
failure to release source code (or disappearance of it) or export
controls, taking this step doesn't require impractical involvement in
deployment details, just continuing to say approved or not, as OSI
already does.

If OSI elects to impose such a minimum requirement, it wouldn't
necessarily need to amend OSD, but rather could find that OSD#2 implies
it.

I'm not advocating that step, but just point out the possibility.

[1] Albeit, people who spend significant time addressing other people's
rhetorical questions generally need a better hobby.