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

[Michael Dolan]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 9:03 AM Richard Fontana via License-review <
license-review at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> The asserted policy
> justification for copyright-triggered termination has no relevance to
> latex2html.py, and yet it is swept in improperly by this termination
> provision.

...

> The OSI must consider how a submitted license will operate when
> applied to ordinary software. OpenMDW-1.1 is flawed in its basic
> conception, as a consequence of the termination provision. Its whole
> raison d'être is to have a single license that applies to everything.
>

Richard, I understand that OpenMDW may seem novel in bundling disparate
artifacts under one license, but that is how most technical packages (open
and closed source) are licensed and received – e.g., a package or
repository with a collection of software programs, documentation, and other
types of assets. I suspect many other OSI-approved licenses with
“litigation trigger” termination provisions would not limit termination to
only the affected materials.

If I take your concern and try to map it to a solution, it would require that
a termination provision be justified artifact-by-artifact within the
licensed work, and I suspect you might agree that is problematic as well.
Apache-2.0's own patent termination applies to the entire Work, including
documentation and build scripts that (presumably) face no patent exposure
at all.

The unit of open source licensing has always been the work as provided, not
each file measured separately against the policy that motivated each
clause. latex2html.py sits in a Model Materials release exactly where a
borrowed build script sits in an Apache Work, and we have debated what "the
Work" covers for twenty years without anyone suggesting their answer could
also affect Apache-2.0's conformance with the OSD.

I hope that helps clarify why, even though I understand the concern you're
raising, I don't agree with the logic behind how you're applying it.

Mike
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