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

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 11:26:25AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> I am struck by the brilliance of the self-shaming aspect of this -
> that ICE would be free to use this software, but would have to
> redistribute ICE-shaming sentence if they redistributed or derived
> works from it.

Same here. Thanks for this wonderful thought experiment, Eric!

> One more practical and probably negative impact: it will always be
> easier to add new names than to remove old ones, because adding new
> names is a simple sublicense that can be done by anyone, but removing
> a name will require a relicense with the consent of every contributor
> who contributed under that license.

I think this can be fixed by having some sort of proxy clause, similar
to what the *GPL3 family of licenses support to decide on the "or later"
license version trigger. You just delegate the ability to update the PNG
preamble to some body, such as the non-profit steward of the project,
and be done with it.

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack at upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
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