[License-discuss] The per se license constructor

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

I really don’t want to relitigate this but my recollection was that

a) the terms that were deemed questionable existed in the already approved 1.3 and

b) a significant part of the discussion wasn’t regarding whether it met the OSD but whether the government had need to retain those terms to follow regulations and that the terms made the license less reusable as a general purpose license.  Which struck me as a particularly specious argument for a license in the special purpose license.

If you believe my recollection is incorrect it’s in the archives and you can correct me. But the fact remains that a license update from a major open source contributor was held up by one individual for years...

Is it necessary to denigrate NASA lawyers operating in good faith to update an already OSI approved license they drafted as “random IP lawyers” and somehow unfamiliar with the open source domain?

Because that strikes me as seriously unproductive.


From: John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org<mailto:cowan at ccil.org>>
Date: Sunday, Mar 17, 2019, 6:20 PM
To: license-discuss at lists.opensource.org <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org<mailto:license-discuss at lists.opensource.org>>
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] The per se license constructor



On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 10:05 AM Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu<mailto:Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>> wrote:

Again, speaking only for myself, but I find it interesting that the need for legal review is considered so important but when a practicing IP lawyer in a specific domain claims that certain license constructs are required to meet the required regulations for a governmental agency that laypersons can simply say “Nope” and that’s pretty much the end of that.

The "Nope" means "Nope, it doesn't conform to the OSD", not "Nope, it doesn't conform to the regulations."  If the regulations prevent release as open source, so be it.

And random practicing IP lawyers, like other lawyers, are used to drafting documents that preserve their client's rights as opposed to giving them away.  That can't be an easy thing to wrap one's head around.

--
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org<mailto:cowan at ccil.org>
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic
arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
                --Philip Guedalla
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