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

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Mar 18, 2020, at 12:46 PM, Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Any long term community or institution unwilling to occasionally reconsider any of its core principles is one doomed to eventual irrelevance. The U.S. Constitution has been successfully amended 27 times, with the first ten of them (the Bill of Rights) happening only 2 years after, the most recent one ratified in 1992 (203 years after first being proposed! now that must have been an epic thread.)
> 

First of all, I don't think anyone is saying that the OSD is written in stone, sacrosanct, and immune from reconsideration. And yes, the U.S. Constitution has been amended over the years, but most of those are procedural changes and modifications, or clarifications of confusion. A relatively small number of those fundamentally change core principles, and one, which was made almost specifically due to "moral" reasons, was soon overturned (prohibition). So the 2 comparisons are not quite exact.

For me, the biggest issue with ethical open source is that the very fact that such licenses leave certain key questions (and answers) open to interpretation are their basic failings. This introduces inherent risk for the end-user because although you might be confident that you are not a persona-non-grata, it really isn't up to you to make that determination. And any wiggle-room, any confusion, will be an impediment for license adoption as well as project adoption for those that use such languages (look at all the endless debates regarding copyleft licenses regarding what is distribution and what is a derivative work).

IMO, one of the underlying principles is that there be as little wiggle-room, as little aspects open for interpretation as possible, and that is why certain aspects of the OSD are written as they are; they create to create bright clear lines in a world of gray nebulosity.