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

[Nigel T]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 12:44 PM Tobie Langel <tobie at unlockopen.com> wrote:

>
> I believe that to many open source practitioners, the meaning of open
> source is much broader than the OSD. For example, Ethan Marcotte coined the
> term "nominally open source," to talk about a project that had an open
> source license, but a closed governance model[1], and many rallied behind
> this definition.
>
> Clearly implied there is a broader set of values that are necessary to
> meet the spirit of open source than just following the OSD to the letter.
>

Nope.  What matters is access to the source, not the governance of the
project whether cathedral or bazaar.  BOTH are and always have been open
source.

If I develop my own little tool on my own and gift the source to the world
under an OSI approved license that's all that matters and I DO meet the
spirit of Open Source because that definition is inclusive and not
exclusive as you seem to prefer.

Governance doesn't matter because you have the right to fork and use
whatever governance you prefer on your own fork.


> So from that perspective, the notion that some of these values are
> antithetical to open source doesn't make any sense. I, of course,
> understand the technical and legal concerns here, but most practitioners
> have never heard of the OSI or the OSD.
>
> So I don't think there's a desire to leverage the open source brand value
> at all here (of course open source isn't a brand), nor do I believe
> most open source practitioners have heard of the term "source available." I
> hadn't until fairly recently.
>

Yes, there is an Open Source brand or your movement wouldn't be trying to
co-opt it.  I noticed that the ethical source folks have freely availed
themselves to the brand by calling it Ethical Open Source and Ethically
Licensed Open Source rather then just Ethical Source or Ethically Licensed
Source.

The Hippocratic License isn't OSD compliant and what is considered
"ethical" is completely at the whim of the licensor.


> "Open source" is just the term open source practitioners use to describe
> what they do, and their conception of what that implies that increasingly
> includes elements that fall outside of what the OSD accepts as such. Hence
> the tension.
>

Then why do you need the OSI?  There is no need to update the OSD.  The
branding doesn't matter right?
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