[License-review] [CAVO] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval

[Lawrence Rosen]

Richard Fontana wrote:
> all I'm seeing here so far is general concern about the OSET Foundation's
> close connection to the wealthy Mr. Kapor

Hi Richard, I don't think that's a "general concern." That was Brent Turner's email, not mine. I'm not complaining about Mitch Kapor's wealth; I'm merely envious of that and ignore it otherwise. :-)  

I'm concentrating instead on OSET's argument that government agencies need this license in order to properly acquire FOSS election software. If that's a valid fear, our community has some work to do to fix it -- and not necessarily introduce another license to gloss it over.

I'm completely in favor of multiple FOSS-licensed components in an election system, just as David Webber described. (As you know, I advocated that general acceptance of FOSS at Apache over the objections of certain license zealots there.) If OSI approves the OSET Public License, then we should accept election system components under that license too. 

I have specifically advocated that the *core* election software be licensed under GPLv3. That way it will play as secure and important and trusted and open a role in our government as Linux already does. You already forwarded my email to this list on that suggestion. But that's up to authors of FOSS software, not me. 

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Fontana [mailto:fontana at sharpeleven.org] 
Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2015 7:36 AM
To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at opensource.org>
Cc: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com>; CAVO <cavo at opensource.org>
Subject: Re: [License-review] [CAVO] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval


How would CAVO, or the open source voting systems space generally, be harmed if this license were approved? (How is it any different than if the OSET Foundation decided to use an existing non-GPLv3 OSI-approved license, such as MPL 2.0 ... or even "GPLv2 only"?)

I think the politics lurking behind these license submissions are worth bringing to light and examining (something which hasn't been done enough in the past, IMO) but all I'm seeing here so far is general concern about the OSET Foundation's close connection to the wealthy Mr. Kapor.


On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 07:50:14PM -0700, Brent Turner wrote:
> Maybe there are answers in the sidebar- - What compels someone like 
> Mitch Kapor to create a new license for election systems ?  What 
> compels him to be in the space of "open source "  voting systems to 
> begin with ?   Certainly we assume he has more than  enough money but 
> is it just greed for more ?  Is it the power that comes with 
> pioneering a new license so that he can be the " kingpin " of voting ?  
> This is the concern of the open source voting pioneer community. OSET 
> has consistently ignored. the open source community and now this new license issue is upon us.  Why would we need a new license rather than use GPLv3 ? .
> 
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
[<LER>] <snip>