License Discussion for the Broad Institute Public License (BIPL)

[Chuck Swiger]

Hello, Rory--

Thanks for your license submission.

My first impression is that this license is OSD-compliant, although without 
section 3.7, the terms in section 3.1 would be a concern to me, and even with 
section 3.7, I'm not sure whether this license is going to be miscible with 
GPL or LGPL code.

Rory Pheiffer wrote:
[ ... ]
> *_SECTION THREE – Plain Text Version of the BIPL_**.* 
> 
> I have attached two documents to this e-mail to aid the discussion.  The 
> first is a Microsoft Word version of the BIPL (entitled /Broad Institute 
> Public License Clean 2006-05-05/).  If for some reason you have 
> difficulty reading this attachment, you can also find the license here: 
> http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/r/p/rpp/www/.  The second is 
> a comparison of the BIPL to the MPL, performed using Deltaview but saved 
> as a Microsoft Word file (entitled /DV Comparison – MPL vs BIPL 
> 2006-05-05/).

By plain text, the OSI is looking for an actual ASCII .txt document, not 
something generated by Microsoft Word.  And in practice, no developer is going 
to want to include a ~200K .doc file into each source code file...

Also, this definition strikes me as odd:

1.1. “Commercial Use” means distribution or otherwise making the Covered Code 
available to a third party.

This seems to be defining "distribution" (or "redistribution"), not commercial 
use.  You don't seem to actually use this definition anywhere in the organic 
terms of this license, although section 9.1 with the reference to US goverment 
terms ("48 C.F.R. 2.101"?) is related.

Also, it would be desirable for the license to be made templatable, ie, usable 
by other initial developers besides the ones listed like so:

> The Initial Developer of the Original Code is: (i) the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (“WIBR”); and (ii) the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) through the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, A Collaboration of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and affiliated Hospitals, and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (the “Broad Institute”).

-- 
-chuck