[License-review] Subject: Dear OSI License Review Committee (sorry, resending)

[Josh Berkus]

> I am submitting the Free Archive License (FARCL-1.0) for official 
> approval. This license was born from the urgent need for digital 
> preservation in the animation and software communities, specifically to 
> address the "End-of-Life" (EOL) crisis of proprietary formats.

Can you name any of these communities?  "Expected adopters" is one of 
the bits of information we ask for from submitters.

The other thing we ask is that you say whether you've consulted an 
attorney on this.  Given the text, I strongly suspect that you have not.

Beyond that, it seems like you have a fairly specific use case for this 
license which isn't just "I want to modify and redistribute this digital 
content".  This is a potentially interesting use case, but I don't think 
it's sufficiently well thought out in order to approve this license. 
More below.

 > 1. MANDATORY DUAL ATTRIBUTION:
 >   Any redistribution, public display, or derivative work must credit:
 >   - "Archivist/Recreator: [Contributor Name/Username]"
 >   - "Original by: [Original Author or Copyright Holder]"

So this license has a key role of "archivist" but this role is not 
defined anywhere in the license.  "Archivist", as far as I know, is not 
a role that's defined in common copyright law or elsewhere, so it would 
need to be clearly and explicitly defined by the license.  Can a lawyer 
confirm this?

 > 2. EOL RECONSTRUCTION & SOURCE CODE LIBERATION:
 >   The primary goal is the technical migration and reconstruction of
 >   closed or EOL formats into functional, human-readable source code to
 >   ensure interoperability and digital preservation. Distribution in
 >   proprietary or closed binary formats is prohibited; the work must
 >   be entirely transformed into an open source code project.

So the standard way that copyleft licenses deal with source code 
requirements is to require the distribution of source code *alongside* 
any other formats. I am not sure that we would approve a license that 
prohibited binary distribution, as that seems to fall afoul of OSD6.

There's also the problem that this paragraph contradicts the first 
paragraph of your license.

 > 3. RECREATION & INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY:
 >   The Original Author or Copyright Holder remains the sole owner and
 >   Copyright Holder of the underlying IP (assets/art/ideas). The
 >   Archivist/Recreator is NOT the owner of the original work, but the
 >   author of the technical transposition into source code. This license
 >   ensures the work is transformed from a restricted format into an
 >   open, reconstructive project.

Now, this is very confusing because here it doesn't sound like you're 
talking about open source content at all.  It sounds like the purpose of 
this license is to have a specific release for archiving content in open 
formats, but for *no other purpose*.   If so, that would be an 
interesting content license, but not open source.  You might talk to 
Creative Commons about it.

And, again, this clause contradicts the first paragraph.

In conclusion:  This license is not ready for license-review, it is not 
near approvability.  It's quite possible that it is not suitable for OSI 
at all, but instead should go to Creative Commons.  I suggest moving 
discussion to license-discuss instead.

-- 
Josh Berkus