[License-discuss] Strong non-discriminatory licensing

[Brendan Hickey]

I've been giving some thought to the feasibility of a permissive licensing
with strong non-discriminatory provisions -- being incompatible with
licenses that violating OSD 5 or 6, rather than just itself abiding by the
clauses.

It seems clear that we can accomplish this goal with copyleft licenses, but
the permissive case is less clear. The GPLv3, for example, sweeps up any
hypothetical discriminatory provisions by forbidding "further restrictions":

"All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further
restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you
received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is
governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction,
you may remove that term."

A bar on "further restrictions" that applies to source distribution but not
binaries might hew a compromise. End users could incorporate the code into
commercial works, but a fork could not introduce restrictive provisions.

Separate from the question of feasibility is the policy question. Is strong
non-discrimination desirable in open source software licensing?

Brendan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20200316/1458a17a/attachment.html>