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

[John Cowan]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 1:37 PM Tobie Langel <tobie at unlockopen.com> wrote:

A solo developer can publish an open source project and refuse to accept a
>> pull request. It misses the spirit and intent, but meets the definition.
>>
>
> Agreed though as I mentioned in my previous message, some practitioners
> today barely consider this as open source ("it's open source in name only").
>

For many years both gcc and BSD were developed in exactly this way.  That
has changed and for good reasons, but to say those projects were "open
source in name only" is a gross distortion of history.  If work covered by
the GPL or the BSD license is not open source, the expression "open source"
is meaningless.  (Indeed, any attempt to show that either license violates
the OSD is self-undermining: the OSD was written to encapsulate what those
licenses provide, not the other way around.)

My project is more of a wayside chapel than a great cathedral, but I have
my reasons for not making it a bazaar.  TagSoup is a rather delicate piece
of software, and I found that almost all proposed patches tended to be
purely local workarounds rather than fitting into the structure of what the
code does and how it does it.  It took me *years* to get to 1.0 because I
myself didn't know exactly what the code should do in detail or how for a
long time.  So now if I get a patch, I may try to do what the patch
attempts but in a different way, or I may not.

I couldn't agree more. You've noted that I'm absolutely not suggesting
> (all) licenses should have these ideals built-in. The crux of the problem
> is that they no longer meet the OSD when they do.
>

The current licenses proposed as EOSL definitely do not, but there is no
reason why software that satisfies both the OSD and the seven points of the
ESD cannot exist (I daresay it does if you look).  So either the
limitations on redistribution should be added as ESD #8 (in which case
software can be OSD or ESD, but not both) or the debate is moot.

That goes back to the tension I was describing earlier. You basically have
> two parties claiming that what they do is open source, one of which doesn't
> agree that what the other is doing is open source, neither having a formal
> claim to the term. Hairy!
>

It happens.  One party to a similar dispute finally agreed to call itself
"North Macedonia" in exchange for concrete benefits (membership in the EU),
but it took decades.   What do the ESD movers and shakers offer the OSI?
I'd like a serious answer to that.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"
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