[License-discuss] Thoughts on AAL and OSS vs FOSS

[Hillel Coren]

Thanks for your email! Can we try approaching it from a different
perspective...

Do you believe a developer should have the option to share their code
without fearing a competitor will use their code against them?

This is from the FAQ on opensource.org: "But depending on the license, you
probably can't stop your customers from selling it in the same manner as
you."

I see the AAL as a good choice here, is there another license you would
recommend?


On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 11:55 PM Lukas Atkinson <opensource at lukasatkinson.de>
wrote:

> On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 at 20:41, Syed Arsalan Hussain Shah
> <arsalan at buddyexpress.net> wrote:
>
>> Regarding ALL
>>
>> Josh claims that there is no repository on github
>> https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-March/021667.html
>>
>> But the
>> https://github.com/search?q=attribution+assurance+license&type=Code gives
>> me so many respostiores and I beleive AAL is widely used License.
>>
>
> Amazingly, most AAL uses I see on Github have silently modified the
> license to remove the GPG requirement (which nearly no one complies with
> anyway? [1]). And most of the modified AALs seem to be in old forks of
> InvoiceNinja software or Attendize? Neither is the license particularly
> widely used, nor are many people using the license as currently approved.
>
> My guess is that at most 100 primary authors on Github use the license, as
> based on a query [2] looking only at license files, excluding one prolific
> author, three frequently forked projects, and excluding the keyword
> “Affero” to detect license databases. Libraries.io lists ~250 packages
> using the AAL [3], but there seem to be severe data quality issues.
>
> [1]:
> https://github.com/search?q=%22attribution+assurance+license%22+%22BEGIN+PGP+SIGNED+MESSAGE%22&type=Code
> [2]:
>
> https://github.com/search?q=%22attribution+assurance+license%22+filename%3ALICENSE+NOT+Attendize+NOT+%22Hillel+Coren%22+NOT+clipbucket+NOT+craterapp+NOT+Affero&type=Code
> [3]: https://libraries.io/licenses/AAL
>
>
>> > I have to add, I find it pretty ironic that your own site uses an
>> attribution based license, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
>> International License :)
>>
>
> The problem isn't attribution – nearly every open source license requires
> some copyright-like attribution notices to be shown. If you want a license
> that handles attributions very well and fairly, consider Apache 2.0 with
> its NOTICE file mechanism.
> The problem is that the AAL perverts the idea of reasonable attribution
> into a problematic requirement to carry advertising-like attributions in a
> prominently visible place.
>
> Attribution means different things in different licenses.
> _______________________________________________
> The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not
> necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the
> Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.
>
> License-discuss mailing list
> License-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>
> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20200330/5ef6bbd9/attachment-0001.html>