[License-review] CC0 incompliant with OSD on patents, [was: MXM compared to CC0 ]

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Fri Mar 9 16:55:05 UTC 2012


Karl Fogel scripsit:

> >If you want an organization that recommends licenses, the FSF is happy
> >to help. I agree that OSI should have a short-list of recommended
> >licenses, but the politics of dis-recommending some organization's
> >license are too much for them.
> 
> This isn't actually the case, by the way.  It's not the politics; it's
> more the time it takes to do it right.

I sat on the committee that came up with OSI's current classifications.
Its original remit was to evaluate licenses into best/okay/bad, but no
one except me was willing to actually say that a license was bad or that
people shouldn't use it, so we wound up with the existing, basically
fact-based classification scheme.  And we took plenty of time just to
get to that, so it wasn't a matter of time.

I believe I was the only non-lawyer on that committee, except for ESR
who wasn't able to attend most of the meetings.

-- 
If you have ever wondered if you are in hell,         John Cowan
it has been said, then you are on a well-traveled     http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
road of spiritual inquiry.  If you are absolutely     cowan at ccil.org
sure you are in hell, however, then you must be
on the Cross Bronx Expressway.          --Alan Feuer, NYTimes, 2002-09-20



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