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

Thu Jun 21 18:35:41 UTC 2018

Actually, I have a slightly different idea; Bryan or Rob, would you be willing to post the complete text on GitHub somewhere?  One of the parallel conversations that has been happening is the use of new tools to comment on and evaluate licenses; NOSA 2.0 could be the guinea pig for the idea of using GitHub to do that.  If nothing else, we can maintain a log of all the issues and comments in one place, so that when we all forget what we were arguing over 5 years ago, we can look up the issues quickly and see if anything has changed since.

Thanks,
Cem Karan

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From: License-review [license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org] on behalf of Smith, McCoy [mccoy.smith at intel.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 1:32 PM
To: License submissions for OSI review; Richard Fontana
Cc: Padilla, Rob (ARC-DL)
Subject: Re: [License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

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Bryan:

Is there any way you can post to the mailing list of the text of the latest version of the NOSA 2.0 license?  There has been a lot of discussion about this license (or government licensing in general, or the interplay between public domain and copyright, or special problems that the USG faces, etc.), but it became so disaggregated I wanted to go back and see exactly the text everyone was debating about, and I couldn’t find it.  Your original posting to the list had an attachment that got scrubbed from the archives:

Caution-http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2013-June/001944.html < Caution-http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2013-June/001944.html >

I also think it might be useful for you to somehow indicate where changes have been made in that license from the currently-OSI approved NOSA 1.3:

Caution-https://opensource.org/licenses/NASA-1.3 < Caution-https://opensource.org/licenses/NASA-1.3 >

I’m not even sure if all the issues that people are vigorously debating are the result of diffs between 2.0 and 1.3.

Might be a decent way to get the discussion focused on the license, its conformance with OSD, any drafting issues, and any other philosophical problems that list members might have with it, or its structure.

I note that you said way back in June 2013 “once NOSA 2.0 has been approved, NASA proposes that the current NOSA 1.3 be retired (with full government retirement benefits, such as they are)” which sounds like a proposal to deprecate 1.3 in favor of 2.0, upon approval of 2.0.  I think that was what Simon was asking about, but given the passage of time, not sure that that statement continues to be operative.

From: License-review [Caution-mailto:license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org]On Behalf Of Geurts, Bryan A. (GSFC-1401)
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 5:09 PM
To: Richard Fontana <richard.fontana at opensource.org>
Cc: Padilla, Rob (ARC-DL) <robert.m.padilla at nasa.gov>; License submissions for OSI review <license-review at lists.opensource.org>
Subject: Re: [License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

Not a problem. Can you be more specific?  Any extraordinary limitations in 2.0 are necessitated by statute and/or regulation. Having said that, however, I don’t think there is anything that either is unclear or unduly favorable to NASA. Happy to discuss.
Bryan
Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 21, 2018, at 7:49 PM, Richard Fontana <richard.fontana at opensource.org < Caution-mailto:richard.fontana at opensource.org > > wrote:
Hi Bryan,

My general impression in the past has been that NASA has been unwilling to consider making changes to NOSA 2.0. If you are willing to submit a revised draft that:
* is written with a view to maximizing clarity and comprehensibility, particularly for individual software developers
* takes care not to give, or have the appearance of giving, special legal privileges to NASA over other licensors and licensees (or else to give a clear justification to us of why that sort of structure is necessary) then I think we can make progress, perhaps rapid progress, towards approval.

Richard

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 5:41 PM, Geurts, Bryan A. (GSFC-1401) <bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov < Caution-mailto:bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov > > wrote:
All,

I am just now seeing this after having been out over the long weekend, so apologies for a slow response.  We at NASA are very pleased to have someone finally express a willingness to work with us on certifying NOSA 2.0!  Apologies that I didn’t respond to Bruce’s December email, but, in looking back over my emails from that period, I couldn’t find it.  Believe me, we at NASA are more than ready to engage any and all interested parties in order to come to a resolution; whatever you need, we will provide as quickly as possible.  As you know, NASA first applied for certification nearly five years ago and has been baffled by a lack of action on the part of OSI ever since.  We responded to every comment from the license-review group as well as from the OSI license-review coordinator (Richard Fontana), but nothing has come of it so far.  In all honesty, we are now discussing the need to upgrade from NOSA 2.0 to NOSA 3.0, but that’s a discussion for another day, assuming we can get approval for 2.0 in short order.  Nigel Tzeng at AFL (below), Cem Karan at ARL, and others have been vocal advocates for NOSA 2.0 (many thanks to them) as some of the many persons and organizations, in particular government organizations, in need of the unique application of an open source license tailored for government created works.  From a legal perspective, government works are in a different category than other software because of a section of the US Copyright Statute (17 USC 105), which precludes the US federal government from creating works covered by a US copyright (foreign copyrights are allowed, as are copyrights assigned or licensed to the government).  Since copyright is the core legal theory under which open source software licenses operate, special accommodations must be made if government created works are to be protectable at all.  The NOSA is all about those special accommodations for government works; no other OSD compliant license addresses these issues.  NOSA 1.3, approved well over a decade ago, is admittedly a bit klunky by today’s standards, but represents a huge step forward for the times; NOSA 2.0 is several steps closer to the “mainstream” OSI-approved licenses.  Both licenses were designed to be fully compliant with the OSD.

Please help me understand the next step forward.  We have an open source legal team at NASA that wrote both NOSA 1.3 and 2.0, that meets regularly and is anxious to address any concerns.  We are happy to engage by email, by phone or even in person if that will move the process forward.

Regards,
Bryan

Bryan A. Geurts
Chief Patent Counsel
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 140.1, 8800 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
Phone: 301-286-7352 < tel:(301)%20286-7352 >
Fax: 301-286-9502 < tel:(301)%20286-9502 >

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From: Tzeng, Nigel H. [Caution-mailto:Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu < Caution-mailto:Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu > ]
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:43 AM
To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at lists.opensource.org < Caution-mailto:license-review at lists.opensource.org > >;cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil < Caution-mailto:cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil > ; Geurts, Bryan A. (GSFC-1401) <bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov < Caution-mailto:bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov > >
Subject: Re: [License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

Bruce,

There was no reply on license review because you didn’t send it to either license review or Bryan.

Caution-http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2017-December/thread.html < Caution-http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2017-December/thread.html >

It’s been over FOUR YEARS since NOSA 2.0 was submitted in June of 2013.  Maybe you should have asked these questions in 2013 rather than 2017?

In any case, according to the archive of the license-review lists from November 2017 to February 2018, NASA was ignored.  If the board has formally rejected the NOSA 2.0 submission in the meantime that’s just awesome communication on the lists.

By blocking the approval of NOSA 2.0 the OSI has blocked the fix for the section that you have an issue with in v1.3 (original work of authorship clause).  If you were interested in seeing that language removed then you should have advocated for approval of NOSA 2.0.

As I noted in License-Discuss, if one the agencies that has been forward thinking and generating GOSS code for public use as part of their strategy for nearly two decades under the NOSA license (Caution-https://open.nasa.gov < Caution-https://open.nasa.gov >  andCaution-https://code.nasa.gov < Caution-https://code.nasa.gov >  ) and likely has released one of the oldest GOSS/PD codebases around (Caution-https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11) < Caution-https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11) >  believes it needs to update that license then the OSI shouldn’t continue to be a roadblock for improving thatalready approved special purpose license but instead be helpful and responsive.

According to Open Nasa they have:

  *   39,054 Open Data Sets
  *   356 Open Code Repositories (155 on GitHub under the NASA account)
  *   41 Open APIs

I think NASA has met and exceeded any “higher standard” set for Open Source and Open Data advocacy and performance.

Regards,

Nigel

On 2/16/18, 4:38 PM, "License-review on behalf of Bruce Perens" <license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org < Caution-mailto:license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org >  on behalf ofbruce at perens.com < Caution-mailto:bruce at perens.com > > wrote:

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 < Caution-mailto: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 < Caution-mailto:license-review at opensource.org > >, <cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil < Caution-mailto:cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil > >, <bryan.a.geurts at nasa.gov < Caution-mailto: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 forthem 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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