[License-review] CC withdrawl of CC0 from OSI process

[Chad Perrin]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 01:44:02PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Clark C. Evans dixit:
> >
> >I think there are a half-dozen approaches to copyright dedication,
> >and great many software developers use "unlicense" over CC0 instead 
> >since it's more in the *spirit* of BSD: short and to the point.  It 
> >would be very nice to have one that is prepared by legal professionals.
> 
> Yes, please.

It would be great if there were enough legal professionals who gave a
crap about open source software development (in a good way) to actually
get their involvement in license development to the extent that all needs
are met.  Unfortunately, that is not the case, so I guess we need to make
do with the mix of lawyer-overseen licenses and those that were written
by people who have a specific need and not enough money for their own
copyright lawyers.

It doesn't help much that it seems like everyone working with lawyers
wants to produce horribly complex systems of license restrictions, so
that almost the only people who *can* read them are lawyers.


> >
> >I think if both the OSI and the FSF backed a single dedication /w 
> >fallback license, you'd see people use it.
> 
> At least I hope so. CC is a known factor, and I’ve been lobbying
> people to put fallback licences on their PD works recently (DJB,
> the libtz people (#FAIL), pdksh¹, several hash implementations, …)
> since the problem with it being local to one jurisdiction has been
> brought up, and have had trouble with some of them (although only
> the libtz people and SQlite are openly hostile).

It seems strange that the SQLite people are "openly hostile", given that
the author (and also of Fossil SCM) has stated he wished he had known
more about the problems of public domain dedication when he released it,
because he would have at least chosen some kind of license fallback to
avoid those problems.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]