[License-review] A request for checking the review status of Mulan OWLs v1

[McCoy Smith]

FWIW, I agree that licenses that disclaim patent grants are not approvable. That's the lesson of CC. I continue to think that the OSI should articulate that as a hard-and-fast rule about approvable licenses so that future submitters know that that's a requirement for any submitted license. There's an underlying issue within that about whether a license that doesn't disclaim patent licenses but doesn't articulate any express patent license is approvable (at least, going forward) which probably also should be addressed (and explained wrt to the approved licenses that do do that).

I'm not sure I agree that a "content" license is not approvable. Not sure, but don't think, that was an impediment to a consideration of CC. Also, there are licenses already on the list that are not specifically limited to software and could be equally applied to content. For example, the Fair license: https://opensource.org/license/fair/  They've also approved the CERN OHLs.  I think if OSI is going to limit itself to only "software" licenses, it need to make that policy decision and make it clear, and perhaps articulate how one distinguishes between a "software" (or "primarily software") and a "non-software" (or "primarily non-software") license, keeping in mind that software licenses have and are being applied to non-software, and vice versa. I suppose a "content" license that expressly states that it must not or cannot be used for software probably shouldn't be approved, but absent that I see no reason why it shouldn't be approved if it could be used with software equally with content.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: License-review <license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On
> Behalf Of Pamela Chestek
> Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2023 7:46 AM
> To: license-review at lists.opensource.org
> Subject: Re: [License-review] A request for checking the review status of
> Mulan OWLs v1
> 
> 
> On 8/14/2023 5:31 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > On 8/11/23 09:56, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> >> The context of the question is whether to approve the submitted Mulan
> >> OWL licenses, so the discussion needs to be on license-review. It's
> >> specifically whether we should approve these licenses. The only
> >> issues that anyone mentioned were that they were content licenses
> >> (and I raised the patent issue).
> >
> > Those are sufficient issues, no?  I mean, they're not going to change
> > these from being content licenses, and right now we have no idea how
> > to approve content licenses.
> >
> I think so, it's only that the response on the list has been somewhat
> equivocal, so I want to make sure everyone is in agreement.
> 
> Pam
> 
> Pamela S. Chestek
> Chair, License Committee
> Open Source Initiative
> 
> 
> 
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