[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) 0.4.0

[Lawrence Rosen]

Regardless of whether a licensor owns the copyright, distribution of that work is still a conveyance of a piece of software in commerce. Among other things, that is a contractual act. Even public domain software can cause harm. A disclaimer of warranty and liability -- even for the public domain portion of a work, within the limitations of the law -- can still be effective in a FOSS license.

Why does the Army Research Laboratory confuse the distribution of a work under a waiver of liability with the ownership (or not) of its embedded copyrights?

Is this a resurrection of the old "license vs. contract" dispute that we buried long ago?

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Fontana [mailto:fontana at sharpeleven.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 9:42 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) 0.4.0

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 04:19:31PM +0000, Christopher Sean Morrison wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 16, 2016, at 11:43 AM, "Smith, McCoy" <mccoy.smith at intel.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> CC0 gives a complete (to the extent permissible by law) waiver of copyright rights, as well as a disclaimer of liability for the "Work" (which is that which copyright has been waived). I believe that to be an effective waiver of liability, despite the fact that there is not copyright rights being conveyed. Does anyone believe that that waiver is ineffective?
> 
> 
> Gee, if only legal-review had approved CC0 as an open source license, 
> it would be a potential option. ;)
> 
> 
> 
> As it stands, the board's public position to not recommend using CC0 on software [1] due to its patent clause makes it problematic.

The point here though is the assumption ARL is apparently making, that an effective warranty or liability disclaimer must be tied to a
(seemingly) contractual instrument. CC0 is evidence that some lawyers have thought otherwise.

Based on this whole thread, I imagine that even if CC0 were OSI-approved, ARL would find fault with it given that it seems to assume that the copyright-waiving entity actually does own copyright. (I have actually found CC0 attractive in some situations where there is acknowledged uncertainty about copyright ownership.)


Richard


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