BSD+1 License

[Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel]

Hi Stefano,

I am a little bit confused on this debate (where I stepped in :-) because your first idea was to propose a kind of BSD licence, but - reading it - it is not really a permissive license. In fact your draft is copyleft, because - if I understand your intention correctly - your code cannot become proprietary, even if you do not specify which "other licenses" can be used in the proposed provision:
"* Source code derived of the original source code, that is distributed as  executable code for commercial use, must be made public using this license and other licenses in which the original source code was made public and distributed".

Then the discussion turn around the strong copyleft GPL... Which one - V2 or V3?

And finally a very important point for you is the availability of the license in languages other than English (you will use Italian, Spanish and English).

Therefore my question: did you consider the EUPL (European Union Public Licence) which is:
- copyleft (but GPLv2 compatible),
- written by European attorneys, 
- used by the European Commission, 
- OSI approved and
- has 22 linguistic versions with identical value?  http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7774 
 

Best regards,

Patrice-E. Schmitz 
Lawyer
www.OSOR.eu


-----Original Message-----
From: Stefano Vincenzi [mailto:s_vincenzi at lavabit.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 5:31 AM
To: license-review at opensource.org
Subject: BSD+1 License

What about publishing and using the software license in languages  
other than english (in my case I will use italian, spanish and  
english)? If the local official language is not english how much is an  
english license enforcable? For reference, CC has translations in the  
most used languages (even if the english version takes precedence).

The current clause:
     * If any software derived from the original source code is  
published and distributed as executable code, the modified source code  
must be included in the distribution or made available by other means  
(including but not limited to: websites and software repositories).  
This applies only to source code derived directly from the original  
software. Source code that is distributed with the original source  
code or executable code that uses it indirectly (including but not  
limited to: an inherited class or an API call), can use any other  
license.

// Bani ha scritto:
>> By publishing I mean in general, the clause doesn't state "publish  
>> to the
>> original author". It is implied (I know, bad idea for a license to  
>> use
>> assumptions) that publishing means making the source code available.
>>
>> N/ please reply to the list also so that we don't get 2 identical  
>> posts on
>> our inbox.
>
> Just keep in mind that if the code isn't distributed, then you can't
> make people publish the code if they don't want to. This has to do
> with the copyright law in U.S., which doesn't protect "personal" use.

Then the clause should include something like: "if you publish any  
software derived from the original source code, you must include the  
modified source code in the distribution, or make it available by  
other means (including but not limited to: websites and software  
repositories)."