[License-discuss] License licenses

[John Cowan]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 1:11 AM James <purpleidea at gmail.com> wrote:

FWIW, I only consider about five different licenses for new projects.
> Not because they're necessarily better than OSL (I never investigated
> that deeply) but because I am against license proliferation, and the
> existing five are good enough.


I have a more specific reason for disliking the OSL.  The GPL creates a
separate commons from
all the permissive open source licenses together because any programs with
GPL components
must (according to common understanding) be released under the GPL.  In
fact there are
two such commons, one for GPL-2-only and the other for GPL-2-upgradeable
plus GPL-3.

The OSL also creates its own commons, one that is never going to catch up
in size and richness
with the GPL's.  Furthermore, there is a separate commons for the
Non-Profit OSL, and apparently
for each version of both.  Therefore I would always discourage people from
using it despite its impeccable
FLOSS Buddha-nature.  This does *not* apply to the AFL.

But if 1(c) in both the OSL and the NPOSLwere modified in a new version 4
from:

with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You
> distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Open Software License


to:

with the proviso that copies of Original Work shall be licensed under this
> Open Software License, and Derivative Works that You distribute or
> communicate shall be licensed either any version of this Open Software
> License or of the Non-Profit Open Software
> License or in the alternative under any version of the GNU General Public
> License


(or words to that effect), I would withdraw my objection.

This can already be achieved on a case-by-case basis by multiple-licensing
language like "licensed under the
OSL version 3.0 or, at the user's option, under any later version of the
OSL, under the GNU GPL version 2, or
any later version of the GNU GPL", but most people aren't going to bother
with that.  I'd like it to be an
inherent part of the OSL.


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Normally I can handle panic attacks on my own; but panic is, at the moment,
a way of life.                 --Joseph Zitt
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