[License-discuss] Possible alternative was: Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) Version 0.4.1

[Jim Wright]

Something is certainly better than nothing, I agree, but I think many of us would rather have an express and broad license from all participants in a project, including the government, than to have to rely on less than well understood public domain dedications and waivers of patent rights that do not apply to all participants.  Something closer to symmetry and broad coverage should be achievable here IMHO - the perfect may sometimes be the enemy of the good, but in this case, we can, I think, do better than CC0.  YMMV of course.

 Best,
  Jim


> On Mar 1, 2017, at 2:01 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> 
> Jim Wright wrote:
> > it seems odd to me to require a dedication to the public domain in any event - stuff is either in the public domain by law or isn’t, and to whatever extent it isn’t, we should have a copyright license, full stop.  Similarly as to patents, I don’t want to have to look at some ostensible policy on waiving patent rights, we should all have a clearly scoped patent license for the project, government and private contributors alike, and there is an easy vehicle to achieve this, use an OSI approved license. 
>  
> Jim, regardless of which OSI-approved license(s) the U.S. government chooses for its distributed software, neither the "public domain" question nor the "patent license" question will EVER be fully answered for any particular software simply by reading those licenses. You have to look at the software itself. Of course, we could all sue each other and let the courts decide....
>  
> I'll be grateful for a published government policy – perhaps posted in the Federal Register someday – that reassures us of a commitment by government agencies to open source using any OSI-approved license.
>  
> Including CC0.
>  
> /Larry
>  
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