[License-discuss] Proposed license decision process

Bruce Perens bruce at perens.com
Fri Dec 28 16:37:49 UTC 2018


We went over this in Jacobsen v. Katzer. I testified (and the court agreed)
that there _was_ consideration in Open Source licenses, although it was
non-monetary.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 4:39 AM Kevin P. Fleming <kevin+osi at km6g.us> wrote:

> One of my colleagues (who strongly prefers public domain dedications
> and permissive licenses) recently indicated to me that in his opinion
> as a software author, the obligation to distribute source code
> qualified as 'consideration', since it requires a tangible (to some
> degree) action on the part of the licensee. I had never thought about
> it this way, but I can definitely see how someone could arrive at that
> conclusion, and this seems to align with Florian's concern.
>
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 9:14 AM Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> >
> > * Lawrence Rosen:
> >
> > > But let us nevertheless agree on a pragmatic definition of "open
> > > source software".
> >
> > > “Open source software” means software actually distributed under terms
> > > that grant a copyright and patent license from all contributors to the
> > > software for every licensee to access and use the complete source
> > > code, make copies of the software or derivative works thereof and,
> > > without payment of royalties or other consideration, to distribute the
> > > unmodified or modified software.
> >
> > I think “consideration” is a bad word, it's difficult to understand
> > for those of us who were not brought up in the English legal
> > tradition.
> >
> > I'd be worried that “no other consideration” would exclude copyleft
> > licenses, or more broadly speaking, licenses that use copyright as a
> > tool to get the licensee to perform any additional action that is not
> > inherently tied to exploitation of the copyright itself.
> >
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> >
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