[License-discuss] [License-review] Encouraging discussion around the technicalities of licensing

Richard Fontana richard.fontana at opensource.org
Wed Feb 6 23:07:51 UTC 2019


On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 5:51 PM Simon Phipps <webmink at opensource.org> wrote:
>
> [Moving this thread to license-discuss as it is not about a specific license]

Thank you!

> On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 10:40 PM Richard Fontana <richard.fontana at opensource.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I lean towards disagreeing with this; I think that the business model of the license submitter can be a material consideration when assessing whether the proposed license meets the OSD and would guarantee software freedom.
>
>
> Just the submitter's business model, or the business models of any possible user of the license?

Just the submitter's, I think, if only because it may be too hard to
think about all the possible ways an approved license might be gamed
or (arguably) misused by a future licensor unconnected to the
submitter. Also I think we ought to acknowledge that in practice
licenses submitted by businesses tend not be used by other licensors
(apart from forks). That was one of the reasons why the vanity
corporate licenses of the earlier era of open source were problematic.

Richard



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