[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[Russell Nelson]

On 3/15/20 10:06 PM, McCoy Smith wrote:
>
> *From:* License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org> 
> *On Behalf Of *Coraline Ada Ehmke
> *Sent:* Sunday, March 15, 2020 5:45 PM
> *To:* license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
> *Subject:* Re: [License-discuss] How can we as a community help 
> empower authors outside license agreements?
>
>
>
>     On Mar 15, 2020, at 7:26 PM, Brendan Hickey
>     <brendan.m.hickey at gmail.com <mailto:brendan.m.hickey at gmail.com>>
>     wrote:
>
>     "It encourages fair compensation. The software project’s
>     maintainers may, at their discretion, request remuneration in the
>     form of code contributions, financial consideration, or other
>     forms of voluntary support from organizations that derive
>     commercial value from the software.”
>
> So asking for voluntary donations or code contributions is verboten? 
> What about all those projects signed up with Tidelift and 
> OpenCollective, are they not open source anymore?
>
> “Voluntary” modifies “support” not “remuneration” or “financial 
> consideration”
>
> And “shall not” in OSD 1 is the opposite of “may” in ESD 7.
>
> Or to simply matters, a license that says “Exercise of the license 
> rights is conditioned upon You paying me fair compensation” would 
> satisfy ESD 7 but violate both OSD 1 and the FSD 2 & 3 (“Freedom to 
> distribute (freedoms 2 and 3) means you are free to redistribute 
> copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or 
> charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere 
> <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#exportcontrol>. Being 
> free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not 
> have to ask or **pay for permission to do so.**”)
>
If it's not clear already, I have a very low opinion of any attempt to 
convert Open Source into Ethical Open Source, but this whole clause 
means nothing. "Encourage" implies a lack of requirement. "Request" 
implies that a refusal is possible. "voluntary" applies to all forms of 
remuneration.

It's a stupid clause. It should simply be removed.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20200316/4cbd3fae/attachment-0001.html>