[License-review] For Approval: License Zero Reciprocal Public License

[Bruce Perens]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Kyle Mitchell <kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:

>
> These are contributors who identify strongly, on
> a personal level, with "open source".  People for whom "open
> source" rings mostly in the kind of collaborative practices,
> governance concerns, and social values
>

Which is unsettling because it allows them to get rid of the nasty freedom
part. There has been an effort to recast Open Source as the "open source
development paradigm". Which doesn't really exist. There is an open
development paradigm and there is Open Source, and one is not the other nor
is one necessary for the other. If OSI is being seduced into that idea,
it's a mistake.

Whatever happens, OSI shouldn't talk past those whose views don't fit on
> that line.  There are more than a few of them.  Many are doing vitally
> important work right now.
>

Au contraire. OSI exists to draw a line in the sand, clearly define it,
promote that you should do things that way and make it clear what is, and
what is not that way, and nurture the development community that works in
the specific way we stand for. Lots of people do great work and we can
appreciate it, but it's not OSI's job to be inclusive of it.

If OSI measures need and community sentiment by volume, like a vote by
> applause at a battle of the bands, it will always hear consumers'
> preference louder than maintainers'. Software itself, especially with
> permissive Open Source
> terms, fairly well guarantees the former will outnumber the latter.  And
> of course users would, as a rule, rather have the most permissive, legally
> tenable license they can get.
>

Many years ago a "summit" of Open Source using companies was held in which
they issued their consensus statement that the developer community should
only use permissive licenses. A fellow named Christopher Blizzard responded
to this with an essay entitled "Every little girl wants a pony". I no
longer have a copy - can anyone find it and the statement that elicited it?

The mission of Open Source developers is not to be a vast pool of creators
providing corporate welfare for the world's richest companies, functioning
as their unpaid employees. We have not set out to facilitate the
development of proprietary software with our work, but to create more Open
Source. To the extent that the proprietary world participates, they do so
under our rules, not the other way around. Or they call it something other
than "Open Source".

Thus, it is within the purview of OSI to recognize that every little girl
wants a pony, and to say "no" when appropriate in the interest of the
developers.

The number one requested feature is setting _negative_ rules instead. Rules
> like "no GPL", or "anything but copyleft".
>

I suspect this request is coming from parties that can afford Palamida or
Black Duck but are unwilling to go to the expense. The corporations need to
have a compliance effort. OSI did not set out to absolve them of that
responsibility.


> http://lillicense.org/


The less-informed approach legal language with the firm belief that they
could improve upon it if only they were allowed to state it simply. But
this "cry in the dark" ends up duplicating the Apache license in its
effect, and the Apache license is brief, well-understood and not baffling
in its legal language. OSI's major responsibility in regard to this sort of
effort is to explain why it ultimately harms the developer community.

I wouldn't underestimate how alienating and frustrating is legal English to
> minds not yet ruined for it.


As you can see from the wording, when I wrote the OSD I was a systems
programmer at Pixar who worked on Linux for a hobby. I had little
understanding of how to properly phrase it, or it might have been written
as a list of permissions rather than a list of prohibitions. Any
development of legal knowledge that followed that was out of necessity.

OSI (and FSF before it) did not create the framework of intellectual
property law, indeed we are more prisoners of it than anything else. The
alienation and frustration arises from the fact that the system was not
built to accommodate us, but to thwart us. It literally exists to make
copying a tort.

It is the unfortunate truth that the words of the license are only a
portion of what needs to be parsed. There is the context of law and case
law. Thus, we arrive at things like an exhaustion doctrine that applies to
the BSD license in regard to patents, but is completely unstated within the
license.

Unfortunately if a developer believes they understand a plain-language
license, they are probably understanding less than half of it due to the
lack of context. We can warn them, or we can train them. We might harm them
by doing neither.


> There is still at least one lawyer, somewhere, doing the analysis.


We hope. Many times I have asked a company what their Open Source strategy
is, and the reply has been something like "we run Black Duck". My
experience with Black Duck and its ilk is that they can't provide the
necessary advice on their own.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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