[License-review] License Committee Report - for board meeting of 2013-11-06 [NASA, EUPL, and Tidepool]

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Fri Nov 1 01:01:44 UTC 2013


On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 10:49:22 -0700
Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:

> Reminder: if you have comments on NASA or EUPL (Tidepool still has
> its own semi-active thread) now is the time for them :)

[...]

> > Comments: There have been some questions about the clarity of the
> > license, particularly the use of "requests" in a section that NASA
> > informs us is optional, and suggestions have been made to resolve
> > those concerns. However, it appears that no substantive concerns
> > about OSD-compliance have been raised.

License text for reference:
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/attachments/20130607/0d342a59/attachment-0001.txt

I would like to raise some substantive concerns about OSD-compliance.
Sorry I did not pay much attention to this earlier. I am cc'ing Bryan
Geurts who submitted the license. 

A general comment: I believe that because this license is coming from
NASA, it should be held to a relatively high standard. I think
there is a natural bias in favor of approval of the license
(because of NASA's prominence, technological and cultural, as a US
government agency, and because OSI has certified a predecessor
license).

3F: What if non-NASA Contributor A or non-NASA recipient B, allow me to
say that they endorse a product or service provided by me: am I
violating NASA's license? As drafted this seems to be possible under
3F, yet it would be an absurd and unfair result.

'Requests' issue (3K):

If, as has been said, 'requests' means 'we'd appreciate it if you did
this, but you don't have to', there is obviously no OSD-compliance
concern, but we have to consider reasonable future interpretations by
others using this license, such as some other government agency. A
mandatory provision would, IMO, clearly not be open source.

Patent and copyright termination (3J):

If this were limited to termination upon the bringing of patent
litigation, it would resemble provisions in a number of OSI-approved
licenses. What I believe is unusual about the NOSA 1.3 provision is the
extension to copyright infringement litigation. 

This clause seems to say the following: If a NOSA 1.3 work X
incorporates some (say) upstream MIT-licensed code authored by A, and A
receives work X, and B, another recipient of X, commits copyright
infringement as a consequence of failing to comply with the MIT license
on A's code, if A sues B for copyright infringement, NASA can terminate
the copyright license granted on X to A. That seems unreasonable to me
and seems to undermine an implicit open source policy of general
nonobstruction of legitimate enforcement of open source licenses and
legitimate pursuit of copyright infringement claims inside the open
soure licensing system.

My concern about 3J would be eliminated if it were triggered only by
patent litigation.

Apart from these concerns, I think this license could be made clearer
in a number of other areas, but I do not think those other parts raise
OSD-compliance issues. 

In its current form I cannot consider NOSA 1.3 an open source license.

- Richard
 



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