conducting a sane and efficient GPLv3, LGPLv3 Review

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Wed Aug 1 12:45:26 UTC 2007


David Woolley scripsit:

> It appears to me that everyone is attacking the wrong people.  The real 
> problem is that that the FSF doesn't care about getting OSI approval, 

True.

> presumably because they think that the OSD is far too broad.

Not much evidence for that.  Very few licenses have been OSI-approved
without being FSF-free as well (I can only think of the obsolete
APSL 1.1 and the Artistic License, which the FSF quite justifiably
thinks is too vague to be FSF-free).

The FSF's disagreement with the OSI is well expressed by RMS
at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html .
He does say the OSI definitions are looser, but doesn't offer any
analysis.

In any case, debian-legal is far more restrictive of what counts as
a free license than either the OSI or the FSF, and they use essentially
the same definitions as the OSI, another bit of evidence that it's
community interpretations that count most, day to day.

-- 
If you understand,                      John Cowan
   things are just as they are;         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
if you do not understand,               cowan at ccil.org
   things are just as they are.



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