[License-review] Outstanding license submissions

[Richard Fontana]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 06:01:27PM +0000, Bryan Geurts wrote:

> It's me again - the squeaky wheel, trying to get the NOSA 2.0
>  license approval greased.  At this point, I honestly don't know
>  what to do.  I had great hopes when you again began moving things
>  forward last month (even if it was extremely frustrating to have
>  you begin again de novo your review of NOSA 2.0 after two years of
>  consideration).  However, that hope has been in vain (again) as the
>  only comments you made were simply not substantive in nature and do
>  not merit a response.  (For example, "COMMENT: I have the feeling
>  that the attempted comprehensiveness of this definition leads to
>  problems."  What problems?)  While I am of a mood to rant a bit, I
>  will try to refrain while helping you understand what is going on
>  in my mind and the minds of the NASA Agency wide legal team of OSS
>  practitioners that wrote NOSA 2.0 and desperately want to see it
>  approved by OSI.

Bryan, I just went back and looked at one of those postings I made
last month. I raised my concerns about the NOSA patent license grant
there:

  C. “Covered Patents” means any patent claims licensable by a
  Contributor that are necessarily infringed by the manufacture,
  import, use, offer for sale, or sale of a Contributor’s Derivative
  Works or Contributions alone or when combined with the Subject
  Software.

  COMMENT: This seems to mean that Covered Patents will never include
  patents held by 'Government Agency'. While 'Contributor' includes
  'Government Agency', what if all the Government Agency distributes
  is 'Original Software'? This might be a major problem (not sure
  yet). Apart from that this definition is confusing given the
  umbrella definition of 'Subject Software'.

This is not a "non-substantive" comment. It merits a response. See
also my other posting from today on NOSA.

Richard