[License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

Bruce Perens bruce at perens.com
Fri Feb 16 21:37:45 UTC 2018


I did not get any reply from NASA when I first sent this, in early December.

    Thanks

    Bruce

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 8, 2017, 21:39
Subject: Re: [License-review] [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0
To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at opensource.org>, <
cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil>, <bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov>


> Could you (meaning you and the board) please give us a breakdown of what
the issues were?
and

> If we resubmit, will we be engaged or simply ignored, as before?

I didn't see any public response to these questions. I am not a member of
the OSI board, but I am the creator of the Open Source Definition. As a
member of the license review committee (admission being equivalent to being
granted a subscription to this mailing list) I would be willing to look at
a new submission and make a recommendation.

I think the missing piece in your previous submissions is that they were
not a good deal for the Open Source developer community, only a license
engineered to grant maximal protection to NASA. The board cited legal
ambiguities in their response, these are of course to the disadvantage of
the community. Individual developers do not have the easy access to counsel
and the legal budget that NASA has, and it's an even worse day for *them *when
they are sued. To give a personal example, my recent participation in an
Open-source-related lawsuit will probably exceed my year's income in legal
fees. So, I believe that both NASA and OSI should place the individual
developer's protection before that of NASA if we are all to pursue Open
Source fairly.

In addition, the language in 1.3 that prevents combination of Open Source
that is not an original work of authorship of the contributor seems to me
to be inimical to the concept of Open Source. I would not have recommended
its approval. I would be especially interested in seeing a submission that
removed that language.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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