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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/25/2012 07:02 PM, Bruce Perens
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote cite="mid:5061E3C1.7080309@perens.com" type="cite">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/25/2012 09:40 AM, Hadrien
Grasland wrote:<br>
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<blockquote cite="mid:5061DE72.9080202@yahoo.fr" type="cite">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Now, people could indeed decide to
add additional license terms to request that one pays some
kind of extra charge for the binary, but I did not and that's
what matters as far as OSD compliance is concerned. Isn't it ?<br>
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</blockquote>
So, you're not looking for a GPL-like license at all in that case,
but an LGPL-like one. GPL very clearly requires free
redistribution of the entire program, including any additions that
people might make to it. LGPL allows derivative works that are not
under the same terms.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Well, I'm not sure it's that. What I want to allow is for derivative
works to be licensed under the same terms and some more.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:5061E3C1.7080309@perens.com" type="cite">
<blockquote cite="mid:5061DE72.9080202@yahoo.fr" type="cite">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"> Otherwise, I have to ask again :
both the BSD and the MIT licenses permit one to charge for
source code by adding extra terms. Should they be declared
OSD-incompatible ?<br>
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</blockquote>
Assume that I give you source code under the BSD license. You
can't add terms to <i>my</i> license without my permission. What
you can do is place your <i>own</i> license on your derivative
work. This might be a modified copy of the BSD license, but it
should not be called the BSD license at that point. My license
still applies to the pieces that I own, without any additional
terms at all.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
That's what I have in mind, indeed. Sorry for using the wrong
terminology.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:5061E3C1.7080309@perens.com" type="cite"> It's
a bad idea to have something called the "Modular Open Source
License" that allows arbitrary additions to be added to it and is
still called the Modular Open Source License once those things are
added. Because, of course, it might not be Open Source any longer.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I agree that this can be a problem. In fact, the original draft
actually featured a clause to avoid this outcome.<br>
<br>
However, note that the name might be changing anyway, and here is
why. It has been suggested on this mailing list that I base my
license on the Sleepycat license, which I didn't know about and
turns out to share similar goals. That would indeed be a more
sensible choice : it's shorter, more to the point, and has probably
already been thoroughly reviewed in the past unlike my naively
home-made draft. But if I did build a derivative of that license,
shouldn't I make this clear by changing the resulting license name
to something matching like "Generalized Sleepycat License" ? Also, I
am not sure if copyright law would allow me to do this without
owning the rights to the original Sleepycat license, do you know if
it is the case ?<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:5061E3C1.7080309@perens.com" type="cite">
There's also the issue of license proliferation. Where the number
of OSI-approved licenses is N, the problem of understanding the
combination of any two licenses in the set requires the study of N
* N-1 combinations by lawyers. Developers aren't often equipped to
do this study on their own. We don't want you to have to hire a
lawyer just to develop Open Source (although that is in fact the
case for companies today). So, we tend to discourage the creation
of new licenses. A license that is literally built to be modified
would thus pose a bad effect for the community, by increasing the
combinatorial problem.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I think that you are misunderstanding me due to the bad wording of
my post above. I would not exactly want to build a license that can
be modified, rather I want to create a license that allows
relicensing of derivative works under a superset of the original
terms, just like BSD and MIT do, and unlike what the GPL (and the
LGPL to a lesser degree) does. The superset would not be the same as
the license, it would be a new license in its own right, and
potentially not an OSD-compliant one. And I do not ask for OSI
validation of the resulting supersets.<br>
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