Antiwar License

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Sergey Goldgaber (sgoldgaber at yahoo.com):

> Could a fee then be charged for military use or use by the Department
> of Defense, or its contractors?  And, if so, is there any provision in
> the OSD against charging them, say, 100 times the GDP of the United
> States Government for such use?  Could such a license achieve OSI
> Certification?

A bit of terminology:

"OSI Approved":  Licences may be posted here for public scrutiny and
comment.  (Comments here should _not_ be assumed to represent the OSI
Board.  For example, I'm speaking for myself alone.)  Discussion
concerns the licence's compatibility with the OSD.  The submitter may
wish to revise his licence, based on those comments.  In due course, the
Board considers still-pending licence submissions, and either approves
them or not.  Existing approved licences are listed here:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

"OSI Certified":  Software issued under a licence conformant to an
OSI-approved licence may bear OSI's "OSI Certified" certification mark,
http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php .

(Thus, one speaks of OSI-approved licences, and OSI-certified software.)

"Open source":  By convention (enforced by community usage), this term
means OSD-compliant software -- i.e., software whose distribution fully 
complies with the concepts embodied in the OSD.  Merely invoking an
OSD-compliant software doesn't (alone) suffice to make it open source;
it must also be issued in an open-source fashion.  For example, a
package might be said to be BSD-licensed, but the author has never made
source code available.  That package would not be considered open source.
(The converse of open source is "proprietary".  Please note that this
term is intended to be descriptive, not pejorative.)

Anyhow, a differential fee structure strikes me clearly violating the
OSD's "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" and "No
Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" clauses.  Therefore, you're
seeking to create a proprietary software licence.

-- 
Cheers,                   "Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm 
Rick Moen                 for a day.  Set a man on fire, and he will be warm
rick at linuxmafia.com       for the rest of his life."   -- John A. Hrastar
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3