[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: [Non-DoD Source] Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) 0.4.0

[Richard Fontana]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 02:24:53AM +0000, Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:
> My understanding then and now was that it had become clear to them that
> Richard and Bruce was going to stall approval for a long time/forever
> unless they took out the patent clause that the open data folks wanted. So
> they withdrew because they were never going to do that and the discussions
> were getting more and more heated.

I'm assuming 'Richard' is me and 'Bruce' is Bruce Perens. Neither of
us were on the OSI board at that time; we were just participants on a
mailing list. Also, I don't recall Bruce Perens' involvement in the
CC0 discussion at all, but my objective was to encourage the OSI take
a consistent approach to the problem of nonstandard provisions dealing
with patents, having remembered the discussion of the MXM license in
~2009, rather than an approach that would be explainable solely by
attitudes towards the license steward.

> If you don¹t believe that was a correct assessment on their part then pray
> tell the status of NOSA v2 that was originally submitted for approval in
> 2013.

That's a special, unfortunate case. With NOSA 2.0 I continued (and
sort of continue) to feel that the license was salvageable with a lot
of work, which no one (including me and I think including NASA) seems
to have the time or inclination to take on individually or
collectively. Possibly, in retrospect, the better approach with NOSA
2.0 would have been to outright reject it as being way too complex
with a number of likely or actual fatal problems. An issue there was
that, until recently, I assumed that the OSI customarily does not
formally reject licenses, as opposed to just not approving those that
are problematic (holding out the possibility of the license steward
submitting revisions or improvements). I think that is actually true
of licenses submitted in the past several years, but I recently
learned that in the distant past there were licenses the OSI actually
formally rejected.

Even now, I still think NOSA 2.0 can be fixed without revising it
beyond all recognition. However, I pointed out at least one
significant problem (related, in fact, to the MXM/CC0 patent
provisions issue) and it did not seem that Bryan was receptive to
discussing it. Even if the OSI did have at least an earlier history of
rejecting licenses, I believe it's true that revised versions of
problematic submitted licenses have generally been prepared by the
license steward rather than that task being taken on by the OSI
itself. That is, it would be strange if the only way to get an
acceptable version of NOSA 2.0 would be for the OSI to take on primary
responsibility for drafting it.

Richard