[License-discuss] For Public Comment: The Contribution Public License

[Kevin P. Fleming]

I would not use the word 'Contribute' in clause 2, but instead use the
word 'Publish'. 'Contribute' implies more than just publication, at
least in common usage in the open source world. In addition, there is
no need to specify "to the public" in the requirement of applying this
license to changes; the license itself applies to everyone and cannot
be restricted to a subset without changing the license text, which is
not allowed by the license. The additional words will only serve to
cause confusion and uncertainty to readers of the license.

On Sun, Aug 4, 2019 at 7:41 AM Moritz Maxeiner
<moritz.maxeiner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> due to me being unable to find a reciprocal software license I'm truly happy
> with I've been working on developing my own:
>
> https://github.com/MoritzMaxeiner/contribution-public-license/blob/master/
> LICENSE.org
>
> I would - eventually - like to submit the license for OSI approval, but
> thought sharing it here, with this mailing list's audience, in order to gather
> feedback beforehand would be prudent.
> The current draft is attached in plain text as LICENSE.txt and the license it
> in turn is under (due to it being derived from the Patches Back Public
> License) is attached in plain text as CHANGING.
>
> What I wanted was a license that's as close as possible in spirit to the MIT
> license, except requiring any modifications to the software to be contributed
> back to the public under the same license.
> After looking over the list of OSI-approved licenses there were three I could
> identify as being close to what I want, so here are my reasons as to why they
> aren't satisfactory for me:
>
> Reciprocal Public License (RPL-1.5):
> It's not only too long and complex for my purposes, but it also explicitly
> defers arbitration to Colorado, USA, which I cannot accept.
>
> Eiffel Forum License, Version 2
> While being sensibly short and concise it only encourages - but does not
> require - modified versions to be publicly released.
>
> Microsoft Reciprocal License (MS-RL)
> It's copy-left for things such as static linking, containers, etc. (section 3,
> paragraph A) and it deals with patents and trademarks.
>
> I hope the above highlights that there's a particular niche that's not quite
> filled yet.
>
> Thank you for your time,
>   Moritz
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