[License-discuss] Can OSI take stance that U.S. public domain is open source?

[Henrik Ingo]

The analoguous explanation for why cc0 didn't qualify is that it explicitly
said "you get rights a and b but not c", with c a necessary right to copy
and use the software. It should be obvious that - even if you'd disagree
wrt patents - at least for some values of c that is clearly not open source.

The fact that many older licenses are silent/ambiguous about c, and were
written in a time when c didn't exist, is a different problem.

henrik
On 3 May 2014 23:14, "John Cowan" <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> Richard Fontana scripsit:
>
> > When the MXM license was considered, some people pointed to OSD #7
> > as suggesting that a sufficiently narrowly-drawn patent license grant
> > in a license would not be Open Source. This was the problem I raised
> > when CC0 was submitted. It was the inconsistency. It depends on your
> > view of how the OSD applies to patents.
>
> Since it nowhere mentions them, I don't see how it can apply to them.
> #7 merely says that licenses of the form "You get rights a, b, and c,
> whereas your transferees only get rights a and b", possibly qualified by
> "unless they sign this", aren't open-source licenses.
>
> I continue to think that our CC0 decision was wrong insofar as it can
> be read as saying that the CC0 license is not an open-source (as opposed
> to OSI Certified) license.  There may be reasons not to certify it,
> but not to deny that it is open source.
>
> --
> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
> Female celebrity stalker, on a hot morning in Cairo:
> "Imagine, Colonel Lawrence, ninety-two already!"
> El Auruns's reply:  "Many happy returns of the day!"
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