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

[Tobie Langel]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 2:18 PM Jim Jagielski <jim at jimjag.com> wrote:

> > 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.


Frankly, I've seen quite a bit of pushback, but I agree that the community
is opening up to the idea. There's no process for doing that yet, however.
It would be great for the OSI to create one.


> 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.
>

Sure, a number of amendments were procedural changes and clarifications,
but let's not forget that there were also amendments which abolished
slavery, and gave women and people of color the right to vote. I don't
think we can quite underline that enough, especially given an international
audience that's not necessarily well versed in American history.

The failure of prohibition actually tells us two things:

(1) that there are a variety of policies that fall under moral or ethical
labels, some of which are anchored in belief systems that are often
specific to a community, and others that are grounded in much more
universal ethical frameworks and stand the test of time, and
(2) that such policies when ineffective or counterproductive can be
rescinded, even at the national level.

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.


I agree a 100%.

For software released under such licenses to be usable and gain traction in
the community (and in particular among businesses), there can't be room for
interpretation. And that is true regardless of whether or not such licenses
would get certified by the OSI.

I think we're all well aware that addressing this requires legal acumen
that few of us have (I certainly don't) and that it is very possible that
it's not addressable at all.

But I've also seen on multiple occasions that attorneys are just as
creative and solution-minded as engineers, if not more, so I wouldn't be
surprised if there were ways to pull this off.

My belief is the OSI should take a leadership position here, in part
because assisting attorneys to craft open source licenses is one of its
purpose (as stated in its bylaws) but also because there's a clear and
strong demand from the community.

And if after a good faith effort to make this happen there's consensus that
there are no compelling solutions to these legal concerns, it will be a lot
easier to put the matter to rest, and focus on driving ethical concerns
through different avenues.

--tobie
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