[License-discuss] Thoughts on the subject of ethical licenses

[Russell McOrmond]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 9:35 PM Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

> Yes, I did. Went through all of them one by one, showing that they were
> not compatible with the OSD, and analyzed the idea of putting
> restrictions on the USE of software versus the DISTRIBUTION of software.


I recognise that this reminder will be annoying to some, but the FSF and
OSI have a problem in that it has already approved licenses which seek to
add restrictions on the mere USE of software versus the DISTRIBUTION of
software.   The AGPL clauses specifically, and other aspects of GPLv3
(Tivoization), opened the door to this controvercial conversation.

I am a long-time supporter of copyleft as a concept, and how to add a
copyleft (GPL) license to existing public domain work was my first question
to gnu.misc.discuss in the early 1990's.  It is not copyleft that concerns
me.  I think once the GPL moved from distribution to use, and focused on
expanding the concept of linking to public APIs, it crossed a bridge way
too far.

My hope that this conversation won't just fizzle without the community
documenting the primary goals (and that is plural, as there are a set of
complimentary goals) of the Open Source community, the reasoning for the
bare-minimum expressed in the OSD, and having an honest discussion about
whether we should provide critiques of existing approved licenses that may
be problemmatic for achieving the goals.
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