[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

[Simon Phipps]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 11:37 PM Richard Fontana via License-review <
license-review at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

>
> This is clearly one of the questions the OSI needs to resolve: is there
> something special about copyright? Or is there something special about
> patent?
>

This is at the heart of the matter, yes. Another dimension to consider is
that while almost all patent litigation involves only patent-holding
corporations, outside the direct experience of most users and developers,
every single contributor to every single project is a copyright holder.
That means any clauses could potentially impact a far larger number of
people, possibly personally. In addition, the availability of such a
far-reaching tool would inevitably be tempting to corporations as a vehicle
for other objec tives, such as to chill complaints about their poor
behaviour by individuals.

So by allowing open source licenses to use copyright claims as a trigger
for penalties, we open up the prospect of dark patterns impacting the whole
open source community. As a license-review community we should be super
cautious of this dramatic expansion of scope with its consequent
significant expansion in games playable.

Surely that would not be okay ... would it?


No, it would not.

Cheers

Simon
(in a personal capacity)
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