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

[Bruce Perens]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 8:49 PM, Kyle Mitchell <kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:

> But it defines "open source software", not "open source license".
>

The preface says what Open Source software is, but the provisions define
the behavior of an Open Source license.


>   The program must include source code...
>

This is because a program could have an OSI-certified Open Source license,
but no source code, and we did not want such a program to be presented as
Open Source. And the rest of the sentence says "and must allow distribution
of source code" which implies "the license".


> Licenses can't distribute source, so OSD is speaking to something other
> than the license here.
>

Nope. It's specifying that the license must allow (not require) the
distribution of source code, and then has some terms to prevent gaming.

But it's not attempting to be a software license, it wasn't written to be a
software license, and if asked to testify I'd still say the use makes no
sense because the subject of the document is not to be a software license
but to specify the behavior of licenses as a class.

And what you're doing is silly, because it's actually just a few sentences
of the OSD you need to use to define how source is distributed, and rather
than use them by reference you could just copy them or make a similar
statement in your own language.

Now, if you want to include the OSD by reference to specify that a
modification must be under an OSD-compliant license, that makes logical
sense but I still think it's bad writing, because you don't know what the
OSD will say tomorrow. It would be much cleaner to specify that
modifications must be under "this license".


> I can lock the reference to the OSD "as originally published" by OSI.
>

The one originally published doesn't include that text. Just the first
sentence. I'm not clear when the rest appeared, it's not in the Debian Free
Software Guidelines.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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