[License-review] Volunteers for tagging licenses

[Dirk Riehle]

(Took license-discuss out of the cc:)

>> I'm not sure the OSI is up for it but some authoritative model of 
>> license obligations and how to fulfill them would be great. The tags 
>> don't have to state how the obligations should be fulfilled, however, 
>> their completeness and quality would make it much easier to develop 
>> such instructions based on an authoritative ontology (hierarchical 
>> list of tags).
> I should have been clearer about that list. That was about 10 minutes 
> of brainstorming and will be reconsidered and refined as part of this 
> task. I think that there aren't rights listed because any open source 
> license is a grant of all rights with some return obligations, rather 
> than any limitation on the rights granted. But I would be interested 
> to hear if that's not true.
>
> What do you mean by "disclaimers and prohibitions"? Can you give me 
> examples of what you believe fall into that category? There is a 
> variety of choices for copyleft, which I might consider 
> "prohibitions," but what are you thinking of?

The model I use for open source licenses has five main components; I 
implicitly but maybe wrongly assumed everyone does it like this:

1. Copyright notice. Not strictly part of the license, but may be 
embedded in the license text cf. MIT license. So maybe a tag like 
Provide-copyright-notice or Text-modification-required may be needed. 
(No license compliance seminar without the question what that string 
"Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>" means and why it wasn't filled in).

2. Rights grant. All licenses we are talking about conform to the OSI 
definition. But in general we shorten that to "free to use, modify, 
distribute, distribute-modified" etc. Are there no subtle and relevant 
differences between the licenses in the rights grant? Or can we rely on 
license-review to completely have ensured equivalency?

3. Obligations. What we all focus on.

4. Prohibitions. I thought this what you are not allowed to do yet is 
compatible with the open source definition. The canonical example is to 
not claim endorsement by the license user. Apache-2.0 has a clause to 
that end.

5. Disclaimer. Are there noteworthy differences or are all disclaimers 
identical/equivalent?

> One thing we're not undertaking is to provide advice on compliance, 
> license choice, etc. There are several reasons for that, one of which 
> is that advice in those areas is fact-specific and will often require 
> the exercise of legal judgment, which is not the OSI's role. Instead, 
> we intend for the tags to be tools that those who do provide that 
> advice can use to help them in their advising work.

Understood. Thanks for the clarification!

Dirk

>
> Pam
>
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