[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: Resources to discourage governments from bespoke licenses?

[McCoy Smith]

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA) via License-discuss
>>Sent: Friday, February 28, 2020 11:26 AM
>>To: Thorsten Glaser <tg at mirbsd.de>; Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA) via License-discuss <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org>
>>Cc: Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA) <cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil>
>>Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: Resources to discourage governments from bespoke licenses?


>>The US Government has a lot of money, and with money can come lawsuits.  These are not only expensive to fight, they can also have a chilling effect on both the use of, and publication of, Open Source software by the US Government.  I personally want to avoid that kind of problem.  (In the earlier discussions on the mailing list, I mentioned the [Rambus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits) litigation as a motivating example).

This is a fairly inapt analogy, since the Federal Government has general sovereign immunity from suit, which it has waived but with conditions upon the remedies that anyone can pursue against them, and the court in which those remedies can be pursued.  https://uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2927
This is why I think it would be more productive to have the government lawyers on the discussion.  They would know about the operation of the Court of Federal Claims, the limits that that puts on private entities claims against the USG, and perhaps how the licenses propose the concerns that they have (about lawsuits, or anything else).
[BTW: in general I think OSI's discussion on license approval is one that is supposed to happen publicly, and I'm not sure why government lawyers would want to , or ought to, get an exception to that]