[License-discuss] OSI definition

[Gil Yehuda]

Mat, I have questions to raise aloud:
1. Would this license comply with OSD?
2. Should the OSI licensing board consider the above question?
3. Who does this benefit and how?

The first question hinges upon the interpretation of the license text. It’s
not carefully worded, requiring you to explain the actual terms. If anyone
can use this for anything, then how does this really differ from a BSD
license (other than some extra text about company size that has no apparent
utility to the license)? If however, the license does restrict some form of
use, then it’s not OSD compliant. That’s obvious.

The second question is one purpose of this discussion list: to socialize,
promote, and discuss proposals that might become actual submission to OSI.
The feedback so far is consistent and clear. This license does not appear
ready to be submitted for actual consideration.

So the third question: what’s the motivation? In some ways this license
reminds me of the Chicken Dance License (CDL)
https://github.com/supertunaman/cdl. It’s a BSD-style license with some
added text that reveals more about the license author and nothing about the
license value. CDL might even be OSD compliant (perhaps accommodating for
people who can’t perform the chicken dance, etc.). But why bother?

At the end, I think you succeeded at pointing to a potential
misinterpretation of the OSD terms. Rather than presenting a license that
tries to demonstrate this misinterpretation, maybe we just need a footnote
or FAQ to clarify (if it is indeed unclear) that not restricting field of
use means just that. If people can use the code for their company, then
their company can use that code. There’s no wrinkle in the process that
results in forbidding a permitted use.

Gil

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 6:31 PM Mat K. Witts <email at dheep.net> wrote:

> There is a lot of latitude around how licenses work in the wild, how
> people work in teams, how judges come to decisions on licensing, how
> lawyers write licenses and the legal implications of companies and so on
> and so forth. Sticking strictly to the license texts and then comparing
> them to the OSI's OSD though, it's very hard to find anything that makes
> leftcopy.org non-compliant.
>
> A persuasive argument that demonstrates a reasonably consistent
> rationale I suspect would rely on either s.5 ('persons') or maybe s.6
> ('field of endeavor') but the definition is a little bit woolly in these
> sections. The main confusion seems to be with the way the words
> 'discrimination', 'persons' and 'groups' are used which makes it much
> harder to get a definitive answer on compliance than it could be in this
> case.
>
> Just to be really clear, leftcopy does not discriminate against human
> beings from using the licensed code, and it doesn't restrict the
> licensed code from any field of endeavor either. That makes it very hard
> to find a convincing reason why it doesn't comply.
>
> On 19/01/2021 20:46, Russell Nelson wrote:
> > On 1/19/21 2:58 AM, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> >> No, the engineers acting on behalf of the company are agents of the
> >> legal person (“juristische Person” in Germany), and as such it’s the
> >> company that’s doing the using.
> >
> > They *could* be programming in their spare time?
> >
> > https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ?t=176
> >
> >
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