[License-discuss] Canons of construction

[Christine Hall]

Just my opinion, but I'm not sure this would be particularly useful, and 
might hinder future license discussions more than help. I think it is 
enough to say that all licenses being considered must conform completely 
to the OSD, and that issues outside of that should be considered on a 
case-by-case level.

Participants in a discussion are already free to point to "case law," to 
point out that issues under discussion were or were not approved 
previously.

Christine Hall
Publisher & Editor
FOSS Force: Keeping tech free
http://fossforce.com

On 7/3/19 10:13 AM, VanL wrote:
> Raising this comment to a new thread.
> 
> Many of the things we are discussing could be resolved, or at least 
> helped, by elevating certain interpretive principles as "canons of 
> construction" that would guide analysis. This approach does not require 
> amending the OSD directly, but instead creating a body of literature 
> that helps all parties reason about it. For example, the comment below:
> 
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 12:55 PM Pamela Chestek <pamela at chesteklegal.com 
> <mailto:pamela at chesteklegal.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     As to "where in the OSD," I disagree with your framing that every
>     license must be approved unless we can point to a specific rule broken.
>     "Out of scope" is a valid reason; that is one reason why the human
>     rights licenses are rejected. Some things are just not appropriate
>     subject matter for trying to fix in an open source license.
> 
> 
> I don't intrinsically disagree with this, but in my head I have various 
> "canons of construction" related to the OSD, and the specific one here 
> is that I had always accepted that an OSD-compliant license must act 
> only through the grant of permissions or conditions on the software 
> itself (as well as being consistent with other elements of the OSD). 
> Thus, "Do no evil" or "do not work more than 40 hours in a week" were 
> appropriately out of scope for an open source license. But in the 
> specific case of the CAL, I had drawn the data portability aspects 
> carefully to only include permissions or conditions on the software 
> itself, thus keeping it in scope for the OSD.
> 
> I think it would be useful, both in this case, and generally, to 
> elaborate on some of these implicit canons of construction. I think it 
> is valid to say that something is "out of scope," but I would suggest 
> that this is a good case to use to develop an articulable rule for what 
> that means.
> 
> Similarly, there may be something to the international applicability of 
> a license that could be fertile ground for a canon of construction.
> 
> Thanks,
> Van
> 
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