[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

Maxthon Chan xcvista at me.com
Tue Mar 31 18:50:14 UTC 2015


Hmm… Would OSI itself be such an organisation?

Since my personal preference of BSDL, I would like to see people writing BSDL-like clauses for different purposes (like my proposed BSDL-like copyleft clause) and a developer can just cherry-pick license features they want by choosing individual clauses and construct a license for themselves. OSI would supervise the creation of such clauses and determine whether any combination of such clauses would create a non-open license or not.

Clauses can be created my taking features out of existing licenses, like a GPL-style copyleft clause, an Apache-like patent protection clause, or a CC-like version upgrade clause.

Localisations should be also considered if this project is to be carried out, as not all US-centric license licenses would work around the world. 

> On Apr 1, 2015, at 02:11, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 3/31/15, 1:59 PM, "Maxthon Chan" <xcvista at me.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> I have a gut feeling that this thread have somewhat common point as my
>> ³simple English BSD equivalent² thread as there are just too many
>> politics and complexities involved in those licenses and engineers, being
>> not-so-professional in law, gets confused easily.
>> 
>> I still remembered my days reading through 17 USC and Chinese copyright
>> law just to grasp an idea on how copyright works, and before I filed my
>> patents I bought a book on how patent laws work. I have to educate myself
>> in those legal concepts just to protect my own work.
> 
> If only there were some (mostly) apolitical organization that could hire
> lawyers and create a universal set of attribution and share alike software
> licenses that would work across legal systems (with variants if required
> under the hood) with simple ways to mix and match features to achieve the
> desire of the developer in a commonly understood way.
> 
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