OVPL summary

[Radcliffe, Mark]

I agree that such differences in rights is not discrimination under the
OSD. Many of the existing licenses are not perfectly recipricol.

I would phrase it somewhat differently since droit de l'auteur is a
right only in certain countries. As the copyright owner (generally the
case), the initial developer has a complete set of rights only some of
which are licensed under the license. The most practical effect of these
rights is mentioned by Chuck, to license the work under a different
license. On the other hand, all licensees will receive only the rights
from the initial developer and other contributors under the license, so
their rights by their very nature are more limited.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Swiger [mailto:chuck at codefab.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 4:54 AM
To: Brian C
Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: OVPL summary

Brian C wrote:
[ ... ]
> So perhaps the OVPL presents a more specific question to OSI: Is a
> license that grants greater rights to an initial developer than it
> grants to other licensees consistent with OSI's principles, in
> particular, does it constitute "discrimination against persons or
groups"?

No.  The author of the software generally has significant additional
rights on
the original software beyond what a proposed license grants to other
people, by
virtue of common law where that applies ("droit d'auteur"), having the
right to
release under a different license, etc.

So long as people can continue to modify and redistribute the software
openly,
asking people who want to make proprietary modifications to grant the
original
developer the right to reuse and redistribute such modifications for
themselves
is OK.  However, part of granting full Open Source rights to everyone
means
that the software has to be feasible for others to redistribute, even if
the
original developer disagrees or no longer exists.

--
-Chuck



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