[License-review] Legacy Approval, Licnese of Jam

[McCoy Smith]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>
> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2021 12:52 PM
> To: mccoy at lexpan.law; License submissions for OSI review <license-
> review at lists.opensource.org>
> Subject: Re: [License-review] Legacy Approval, Licnese of Jam
> 
>If you say licenses of this sort are not open
> source, that would mean that many packages assumed to be open source
> are actually only partly open source, and perhaps even embody some sort of
> FOSS license violation. In this case it is clear from the license text that "use"
> was meant to encompass permission to modify.
> 
> There are other cases where legacy licenses have later come to be seen as
> non-FOSS, the best example of which may be the Sun RPC license.
> (See: https://spot.livejournal.com/315383.html) But those are cases where it
> is impossible to read the license as being consistent with normative
> definitions of FOSS.
> 
> I don't know if OSI should start granting legacy approval to the large numbers
> of licenses of this sort, but I see some benefits to moving OSI approval closer
> to the reality of how "open source" is understood in the community.
> 
> The strongest objection I see to granting legacy approval here is why the OSI
> should start with *this* license when there are plenty of others in the same
> category that are probably more frequently encountered.
> 
Yes, it seems like the legacy standard is looser than for non-legacy approvals. I'm curious how loose it ought to be. This one probably meets the OSD if you assume a lot of liberality on implied license grants (both copyright, and patent). Also, for legacy approvals, what quanta of current usage is required? One package seems pretty low.