[License-review] Mandatory meta OSI process thread

[Florian Weimer]

* Bruce Perens:

> On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 12:34 PM Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
>
>> I assume the current requirement that you relicense your entire operating
>> system and toolchain is not intentional and will disappear with a future
>> revision of the license text.
>>
>
> Hi Florian,
>
> Anyone who wishes to can participate in the license-review mailing list,
> provided they maintain some minimum standard of civility and
> signal-to-noise. IMO the main requirement is that you can discuss license
> terms and related issues such as actual use of the license. No formal legal
> education is required. So, IMO, it doesn't make sense to say that a
> discussion in the context of OSI doesn't represent a particular community.

Sorry, that really wasn't my intent.  I expect this to be a license
specific to this particular software, tailored around the needs of its
commercial backer, and not something that is generally applicable.

More important for the success of the license is consensus among
participants in the existing software ecosystem that's certainly going
to change as the result of relicensing.  Maybe OSI approval matters to
these people, maybe not.  But it is odd to demand a collaborative
process at the expense of these people.  In my opinion, they should
certainly have a say in the general *direction* (e.g., do they still
want access to pre-compiled packages from their favorite
distribution?), and after that, the OSI process can kick in and figure
out a way to implement these goals within the OSD.

Or put differently: Your main complaint seems to be that the new
license was dropped off at OSI.  That's certainly not nice.  But it
was forced upon the existing ecosystem, and the details OSI
interaction appears to be a minor issue compared to that.  It's
different for something that affects a large ecosystem which isn't
clearly defined (such as the body of all GPL software), but that's
clearly not on the table here; the ecosystem in question is fairly
self-contained.

> The terms in section 18 are written to as broadly as possible
> capture anything even peripherally involved with the offering of a
> service, and are *certainly* intentional.

They the terms are intentional as far as they were posted here.
Whether the consequences (libc relicensing etc.) are intentional I'm
not sure.  Perhaps the intent is to create so much FUD that commercial
users are virtually forced to obtain a separate license (we have
certainly seen that with a popular GPL-licensed database software),
but I find that a bit far-fetched.  Obviously, how to fix the license
depends on the real goals, and we may never know those.