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

[Meeker, Heather J.]

I was sidetracked because Section 4 is, for the most part, already in MPL 2.0 (whereas 3.5B is the new language we added).  In Section 4, we added "national security or necessity of public interest" to "statute, judicial order, or regulation."  So if there is a concern generally with this mechanism, it also exists for MPL 2.0.  If there is a difference, it would be a matter of national security or necessity of public interest that is not embodied in any law.  I would expect that to be rare, but the clarification was important to our constituency.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Berkus [mailto:josh at postgresql.org] 
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 2:58 PM
To: Meeker, Heather J.; License submissions for OSI review
Cc: Gregory Miller; John Sebes; christine at osetfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [License-review] Submission of OSET Public License for Approval

On 09/03/2015 02:49 PM, Meeker, Heather J. wrote:
> 2. Ability to adjust terms downstream
> This provision says you can "place additional conditions on the right granted" and that would not include additional grants of rights or waiver of conditions.  That distinction may sound like a legal technicality, but in open source licensing there is an important difference between license conditions -- which narrow a grant of rights -- and granting additional rights or removing conditions.  For example, in most copyleft licenses, you cannot place additional conditions on the exercise of the license at all, or remove any condition.   Our variation is actually very narrow -- only as required by law.  I take your point that states can pass crazy laws.  But if a law says a state can't use the software for elections except with restriction X, and the license (such as GPL) says you can't impose restriction X, then the state cannot use the software at all, and we are trying to avoid this result.

Um ... no?

I'm talking about clause 4, 4. Inability to Comply Due to Statue or
Regulation.  This quite clearly allows recipients to waive some or all
of the license provisions.

--Josh Berkus