[License-discuss] Issue on licenses pages

[Lawrence Rosen]

Engel Nyst wrote:
> It seems that OSL 1.1, 2.0, and AFL 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 are not accessible
at 
> http://opensource.org/licenses/[SPDX name]. As far as I know/find, they 
> have been approved.

Not only were they approved, they were originally written at the behest of
the same OSI board of directors that approved those early licenses. Those
board members were experimenting with provisions that sought to protect open
source from patents. I worked with them to implement what they then wanted.
As you can tell, we went through several iterations.

The early attempts were objected to by certain large companies who had
patent portfolios to protect. They did not want to tie a copyright license
for FOSS software to a reciprocal patent license, particularly one that
opened their entire portfolios to such licenses for open source. I find it
interesting that, nearly 10 years later, some large patent owners are
writing their own broad non-asserts for open source software that accomplish
some of the same goals. Open source and patent policies have come a long
way....

In any event, those early OSL and AFL licenses have been "deprecated" by its
author, me, now that nearly everyone has stopped fighting over patent
provisions and has grown accustomed to OSL/AFL/NOSL 3.0.

It has been frustrating to watch people here try to place licenses in broad
categories without understanding fully the subtle differences in their legal
provisions that can have enormous financial impacts.

/Larry

Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
Office: 707-485-1242
Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu 


-----Original Message-----
From: Engel Nyst [mailto:engel.nyst at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 2:24 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: [License-discuss] Issue on licenses pages

Hello license-discuss,

It seems that OSL 1.1, 2.0, and AFL 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 are not accessible at
http://opensource.org/licenses/[SPDX name]. As far as I know/find, they have
been approved.

A number of discussions on OSI mailing lists archives reference their
approval.

They are also not listed in superseded category.

Is the text intended to no longer be accessible?
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