[License-review] Fwd: For Approval | Open Source Social Network License 1.0

[Florian Weimer]

* Kevin P. Fleming:

> There are many approved licenses which require copyright and
> attribution notices to be retained. What is at issue here is this:
>
> 1. Must they be retained in source code distributions?
> 2. Must they be included in binary distributions?
> 3. Must they be presented to the user of the software in any fashion?
>
> (1) is quite common and completely acceptable.
>
> (2) is also quite common and completely acceptable.
>
> (3) is not common, and by common interpretation of the OSD it is not
> acceptable because it disallows a particular type of modification of
> the software. OSD-compliant licenses allow recipients to make any
> modifications they wish and to distribute those modified versions.

The GPL always had a requirement for (3).  Since version 2, it is
conditional on whether the software already has this feature, though.

(I have come to the conclusion that the main problem with such license
requirements is that too much software under such licenses does not
actually comply with its requirements, and that the conditional nature
of such requirements is crucial in practice for automatic license
compliance.  See the recent discussion on license-discuss.)