Legacy Approval - CodeIgniter License Agreement

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 04:22:56PM -0700, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> On Oct 24, 2010, at 4:02 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> [ ... ]
> >> This is plainly Open Source and is basically a 3-clause BSD except for
> >> the indemnity clause.
> > 
> > No, point 5 is similar to the advertising clause of 4-clause BSD, which
> > has never been approved.  I don't see why this should be approved now.
> 
> The four-clause BSD license has been deprecated since ~1999, but it's not against any of the OSD clauses either....

Clause 5 of this license is not a 4-clause-BSD-style advertising
clause. It is an acknowledgement requirement which seems comparable to
ones I've seen in some other licenses generally regarded as free
software/open source (though probably raising issues of GPL
compatibility).

The indemnity clause is rather broad; while two licenses with upstream
indemnification requirements, Apache 2.0 and Eclipse Public License
1.0 (plus its ancestors), are OSI-approved, those clauses are narrower
than this one. I myself don't think licenses with blanket
indemnification clauses should be accepted as Open Source without
further study, or some consensus among other organizations/projects
involved in license gatekeeping (e.g. FSF, Debian, Fedora) that they
present no problem.

 - RF