MPL 2 section 11

[Carlo Piana]

On 11/25/2010 06:41 PM, Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel wrote:
> Sounds good to me!
> May I politely suggest to OSI to adopt the following "interoperability principle" #11 regarding copyleft?
>
> "Combined works based on components covered by different OSI-approved copyleft licences can be distributed "as a whole" under any of these licences. This does not change the primary licence of each covered component (including their derivatives)"
>
> As license proliferation is a definitive fact and as solutions combines a growing number of components, this could remove a lot of "legal FUD" from communities!
> Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz
> Legal expert, www.osor.eu
>
>
>

I respectfully submit that it is not for a definition of what "open
source" to advocate a particular interpretation of the law or indeed to
establish -- via licensing approval rules -- a change in the applicable
law.

License proliferation is not a definitive fact and should be
definitively countered, not facilitated, as proliferation has nefarious
consequences beyond reciprocal incompatibility of different licenses.
Permissive license are thousands, and surely they have no compatibility
problems if they adhere to the OSD, but nonetheless this fact is a
problem per se.

If somebody wants to have her software under a strong copyleft license
and that alone, as much as the law permits, I believe it should be her
right to attempt to do so, and not to be forced to accept different
licenses for expeditiousness sake. The law on what is a derivative is
the only limit. Task of the OSI -- IMHO -- should be that of
discouraging any attempt to do so under "exotic" licenses and chose
instead one of the well established ones (the fewer, the better). That
is to say, be as restrictive as reasonably possible on new strong
copyleft licenses, because they have more externalities than the
permissive ones.

Conversely, if somebody accepts to have her software to be used in a
wider way and more liberally re-licensed under a larger work of some
sort, she should have the choice to either issue an exception or to
choose a liberal license or a "weak" copyleft one.

With best regards,

Carlo