[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: OSI equivalent

[Simon Phipps]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 5:00 PM, Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) <
cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil> wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Sullivan [mailto:johns at fsf.org]
> > Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2017 10:10 AM
> > To: Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) <cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil>
> > Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org
> > Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: OSI equivalent
> >
> > "Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US)" <cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil>
> > writes:
> >
> > > --===============0423943140736445875==
> > > Content-Language: en-US
> > > Content-Type: multipart/signed; protocol="application/x-pkcs7-
> signature";
> > >     micalg=SHA1; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00EE_01D28833.18234540"
> > >
> > > ------=_NextPart_000_00EE_01D28833.18234540
> > > Content-Type: text/plain;
> > >     charset="utf-8"
> > > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> > >
> > > Beyond that, is the FSF interested in compatibility between non-FSF
> > > licenses?
> > > That is, if MIT and Apache 2.0 happened to be incompatible with one
> > > another, would FSF care provided they were both compatible with the
> > > GPL?  In my opinion, OSI is supposed to be more neutral on the
> > > matters, and therefore should care more about such situations.
> > >
> >
> > I can't immediately picture the specific situation you're talking about,
> but
> > in general we do care. For one thing because we recommend
> > other licenses depending on the situation (see
> > Caution-https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.en.html).
> >
> > We also do support all free software, not just GPLed or even just
> copyleft
> > free software. Our licensing at fsf.org team answers questions
> > that have to do with other licenses in both their correspondence with the
> > community and in our compliance work.
>
> OK, so FSF is willing to take this on for OSI?  Will OSI defer to FSF on
> this?
> Ideally there will always be one canonical source of information for
> license
> compatibility so that there isn't any confusion.
>

As was mentioned earlier in the thread, the "compatibility" of licenses is
a context-specific matter, so the concept of canonical abstract
compatibility information seems nonsensical in the general case.

As the author of the GPL family of licenses the FSF is a great source of
advice on the combinability of other licenses with theirs, although the
only opinion that really matters is that of the copyright holder who has
chosen to use a particular license. For other license combinations, I would
not expect the FSF to volunteer as an authority and doubt their third-party
view would be sought.

S.
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