[License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software License, Version 1.3 (C-FSL v1.3)

[Rob Landley]

On 1/14/19 5:57 AM, Simon Phipps wrote:
> It may be worth reminding some folk that we approve licenses for general use. It
> should be possible for many users of the code to simply proceed knowing that a
> level playing field of rights delivering the four freedoms are ensured by OSI
> approved licenses. While there's some precedent for licenses explicitly
> delivering asymmetric rights (consider SISSL for example), I don't believe there
> is a precedent for one of those sets of rights being effectively a
> non-OSI-approved license.

Sadly there's plenty of precedent for what they're _trying_ to do. Companies
pulling a bait-and-switch on their users happens all the time. This fun little
blow-up was from _Thursday_:

https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1083589923670638593
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083476975312949250
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083409194479505410
https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1083401391408697344
https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1083365921832325120
https://twitter.com/SimoRoth/status/1083360124243230720

Sudden changes for a single company's exclusive commercial gain at the expense
of the rest of the project's users seems exactly what this sort of license is
explicitly designed to allow. It's even in the same domain (cloud services which
people wouldn't have built on that platform if they thought it would be yanked
out from under them; they'd have used something else instead).

People wanting that isn't new. Wanting to mislabel the bait-and-switch "open
source" (to heighten the bait part) isn't even new...

Rob