License Committee Report for September 2009

[Giancarlo Niccolai]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Giancarlo Niccolai <gc at falconpl.org> writes:
>   
>> Also, we're starting communication campaigns (read $ investments) in
>> the next two-three months.  [...]  The guarantee of an OSI certified
>> license which is disengaged from some GPL limitations in this specific
>> software application type is primarily important.
>>     
>
> Surely you don't think the OSI will rubberstamp your license just
> because your business plan depends on it?  Perhaps you should have
> considered the issue more carefully to begin with, and chosen an
> existing, approved license instead of making up your own.
>
> DES
>   
OF COURSE I don't think nor I want it. And my business plan doesn't 
depends on it. The term "primarily important" may be a bit misleading. 
It's important as it displays our will to be part of the Open Source 
community, and not to try to sneak some suspicious software around. It 
has no relevance in terms of business models; and in fact, we're 
currently shipping Falcon under different licenses in various Linux 
distro, and to various commercial entities. Sorry if the wording mislead 
your judgment.

The issue of presenting a new license has been considered carefully, 
through a years-long process of refinement, legal advices, comments and 
suggestions from our community and from our professional/commercial 
users. It has been chosen after ascertain the fact that there wasn't an 
already approved license immediately suitable for this kind of 
application. And this is a FACT, as every other open source software in 
this category has either its own license, approved by OSI or not, and/or 
dual license and/or extremely broad exceptions and/or grants special 
usage licenses on a per-user contractual basis. The only exception, to 
my best knowledge, is LUA, which has gone BSD since version 5.0, (it had 
its own license before) but LUA scripting language requires source-code 
level integration in the user application, and has a pretty peculiar 
development model.

I remind again the nth time that I am open to any suggestion the OSI has 
to improve the license. Also, I notice that, up to the moment, no 
criticism has been raised with respect to the license content, which is 
"Clearly OSD-compatible".

Finally, let me state that your criticism seems not to take into 
consideration a single point the rationale in which I indicated why it 
was impossible to use an existing license, and why I am all through 
this. Honestly I don't think my effort for the community deserves those 
words.

Bests,
Giancarlo Niccolai