[License-discuss] License Stewards

[Grahame Grieve]

in the absence of a license statement on a license itself, then
the license can only be re-used under the terms of fair use, just
like anything else that is published without a license?

Grahame


On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> A recent thread on the legal-discuss@ list at Apache asked whether someone
> could take the Apache License 2.0 and revise it for their own purposes.
> After a side trip I took into the esoteric question about whether a
> copyright license could itself be copyrighted, I bring the discussion to
> this license-discuss@ list at OSI along with a bit of history. (I’m copying
> the legal-discuss at apache list only for closing the circle.)
>
>
>
> In the olden days, open source licenses usually contained a copyright
> statement and the identification of a “license steward”. This person or
> organization (e.g., RMS/FSF for the GPL licenses; IBM for the CPL; and
> Mitchell Baker at what was then the Mozilla Project for the MPL) reputedly
> had exclusive control over future license versions. Indeed, Mitchell took
> offense at that time because, without her permission, I had revised the MPL
> license into a version I thought was easier to read and understand (the
> Jabber license, since deprecated).
>
>
>
> Whether or not the license steward role was legally significant, it
> certainly raised control issues in the community and created animosity over
> license language purity even where personal offense was not intended. Even
> though the goal was to change the license for some presumably good legal
> effect, some people still took offense when their “own” words were changed.
>
>
>
> When I released the AFL/OSL licenses in early drafts, I omitted any
> declaration of license steward but I asserted with a copyright notice that I
> was the author of those licenses. Several people (including, I remember,
> Mitchell Baker) complained that I was claiming control over a license that
> people might want to enhance or change. Nobody trusted that I personally (or
> my heirs) would forever have the good of the community at heart.
>
>
>
> I agreed with them. That was my incentive to write section 16 of those
> licenses, which declared authorship but disclaimed control over changes.
> This section 16 also carefully prohibited what was then characterized as
> “relicensing” of existing works; declared that the name of the license was
> exclusive; and reminded the world that only OSI could bless a revised
> license as “open source”.
>
>
>
> Here’s what section 16 of the OSL says:
>
>
>
> 16) Modification of This License. This License is Copyright © 2005 Lawrence
> Rosen. Permission is granted to copy, distribute, or communicate this
> License without modification. Nothing in this License permits You to modify
> this License as applied to the Original Work or to Derivative Works.
> However, You may modify the text of this License and copy, distribute or
> communicate your modified version (the "Modified License") and apply it to
> other original works of authorship subject to the following conditions: (i)
> You may not indicate in any way that your Modified License is the "Open
> Software License" or "OSL" and you may not use those names in the name of
> your Modified License; (ii) You must replace the notice specified in the
> first paragraph above with the notice "Licensed under <insert your license
> name here>" or with a notice of your own that is not confusingly similar to
> the notice in this License; and (iii) You may not claim that your original
> works are open source software unless your Modified License has been
> approved by Open Source Initiative (OSI) and You comply with its license
> review and certification process.
>
>
>
> Most licenses nowadays omit declarations of license stewardship and don’t
> even mention the ownership of future derivative versions. For example – and
> this was the gist of the question on the Apache legal-discuss@ list – the
> Apache License 2.0 says nothing about the right to create derivative
> versions of the license.
>
>
>
> In this ambiguous situation, what is the default rule for derivative works
> of open source licenses? My assertion is that all open source licenses may
> freely be copied or modified into different versions; permission from a
> license steward is never necessary to do that because these are functional
> legal documents for which copyright protection is inappropriate. (In an
> email at Apache, I characterized my copyright notice on my own licenses as
> “chutzpah”.) Without OSI approval, however, nobody responsible will call the
> modified license an “open source license”.
>
>
>
> Do you agree?
>
>
>
> /Larry
>
>
>
> Lawrence Rosen
>
> Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
>
> 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
>
> Office: 707-485-1242
>
>
>
>
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