[License-discuss] Ethical open source licensing - Persona non Grata Preamble

[John Cowan]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 2:59 PM Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

There has been a long history of people asking for help from
> license-discuss in drafting licences to implement poorly considered
> ideas.


That is true, but not yet applicable.  So far we have only seen a request
to discuss the idea, and we have discussed it.  No request to draft a
license has been forthcoming.


> The crowning irony of that incident was soon to follow:  None of the
> badgeware firms (nor, as far as I can tell, anyone else) actually used
> CPAL.


Per WP, Zimbra (which has been sold several times) now has a GPL 2.0 only
backend and a CPAL front end (in addition to its proprietary license), so
perhaps we did not sacrifice ourselves entirely in vain.
Sugar's open-source version has gone from MPL+AAL to GPLv3 to AGPLv3, but
since the announcement of 7.0 (2013) they are no longer maintaining it.
There are. however, several forks.


> Amazon/ICE and BP (ex-British Petroleum)


Very simply, people who have strong emotions about these companies are
usually against them, whereas people have strong emotions both for and
against RMS.  Using him as an example would just invite even more Sturm und
Drang.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application:
        WELCOME TO <censored>
        DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20200222/1445ba72/attachment.html>