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

[Bruce Perens]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 9:46 PM, Kyle Mitchell <kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:
>
> Please understand that I'm not doubting intent here, yours or that of
> others who approved of the text later.


And I just want to make sure that the users of this license don't run into
trouble in court. One way to reduce ambiguity is not to include a
not-for-purpose document by reference that will lead some judge into a
rabbit hole when you could just copy a few sentences of language.

First, the sentences that follow use "must", not "may".
>

Must *allow* source code redistribution. Not must require it. All of the
terms you want follow that, and are diluted by it.


> Second, a great many approved licenses don't say anything about
> reproduction cost or preferred form.  BSD-2-Clause, for example, is silent
> on them.
>

People don't think of why the BSD license came about. The US Government,
through ARPA, funded projects at UC Berkeley to add virtual memory
facilities to Unix in order to support computer graphics, fast crash-proof
filesystems and fsck (yes, there was Unix before fsck), and better
networking. Since this was supported with your taxpayer dollars, the BSD
license was created to give all taxpayers the maximal utility from that
work. ARPA's mission was in part an economic one, not only to seed
technology but to have the resulting industrial capabilities (both hardware
and software) exist within US manufacturers in case they were needed for
war. At the time, it was believed that facilitating the development of
companies like Sun Microsystems and SGI was the best way to achieve the
economic mission, and these companies were not out to redistribute source
code.

So, if the BSD license is silent on source code redistribution, it is
mainly because they and their funder didn't expect anyone but them to do it.

I'm convinced to use my own language, but neither copying nor rephrasing
> come without cost.
>

There was a cost for referencing too, and we're not talking about a license
the size of the GPL.

> That means a potential mismatch between "Open Source" as defined by OSD
and "Open Source" as defined by L0-R.

I am just hoping to keep "Open Source" as it was intended to be when this
organization was started, and that is fraught enough.

The original L0-R proposal used publication plus licensing
> under OSD conformant terms.  I backed up to "Open Source
> Software" as defined by OSD due to concerns about "publish",
> and realization that OSD said a lot about distribution.  If
> there's reason to acknowledge OSD is incomplete as to source
> availability, you're right, I should speak to it myself.
>

If you reference the OSD to define what is a compatible license for
modifications, you should also have a backup. As in "An OSI-certified Open
Source license or a license no more restrictive than this one." And you
will need separate language requiring source-code availability for the
entire program.

If the OSI minutes exist, dates and text of revisions can probably be found
in it.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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