[License-review] Approval: Server Side Public License, Version 2 (SSPL v2)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Nigel wrote:
> And “for-profit” is not the pejorative you think it is for many devs even
> in FOSS

All Open Source licenses should treat for-profit and not-for-profit/hobbyist
activity equally; that's essential to the OSD.  I apologize that my email
seemed to communicate something different; I must have simply misworded
something.

My comment was not about that, it was about who should be the license
stewards.  Most license stewards are either charities or trade associations
-- both of which are not-for-profit.  Open Source licenses that are stewarded
by for-profits (e.g., CDDL by Oracle) have had a mixed history.  Much of the
anti-license-proliferation work that OSI did in the very late 1990s and early
2000s was to convince for-profit companies to not become license stewards
themselves.

I *do* think OSI should consider who the license steward is and what their
motivations are as part of the license approval process.  I understand that
some might disagree and argue that the "text should stand on its own".

Brendan Hickey raised an interesting point related to this: that the
existence of an upgrade clause in the license means the license steward has a
lot of power.  Brendan's comments caused me to realize that OSI really does
need to trust the license steward when an upgrade clause is in play.  Most
users of the OSI-approved license list could easily be confused if earlier
versions of the license are Open Source but later ones are not.  If an
upgrade clause is involved, licensees could easily be in a completely
confusing scenario if OSI has approved that earlier version and both the Open
Source and non-Open-Source versions are active in the wild.  At this point,
we have that scenario with SS Public License already, since the SS Public
License v1 was used to license actual code already and is the active license
of a project right now.

(BTW, I moved the thread about upgrade clauses that Brendan started to
license-discuss, as I understand VM Brasseur's messages to indicate that we
should be moving threads that don't really have to do with SS Public License
over to that list.)
--
Bradley M. Kuhn

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