For Approval: Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0

[zooko]

On Jan 31, 2009, at 22:08 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:

> zooko wrote:
>> When such people come to you and ask "Would it be a good idea to  
>> release my software under the TGPPL?", it would be perfectly  
>> appropriate for you to advise them against.  However, when people  
>> come to you and ask "Is the TGPPL an open source licence?" it  
>> would be inappropriate for you to reply to them "Never heard of it.".
>
> Let's hope that my memory for acronyms is good :-)

;-)

Actually I intended that statement to apply to the OSI itself and not  
only to you personally, although I also meant much of what I wrote to  
be about you personally.  I meant that when a person decides to seek  
the OSI's opinion about whether the Transitive Grace Period Public  
Licence is open source, then the way that they do that is to peruse  
the OSI's web site and its list of OSD-conformant licences to see if  
the TGPPL is there.  If the OSI omits the TGPPL from the list of OSD- 
conformant licences even when OSI knows that it is, in fact, an open  
source licence, then this is the equivalent of the "never heard of  
it" conversation that I outlined above.

Compare with the FSF's list of licences, where they clearly  
distinguish between their opinion about whether a licence is Free  
Software or not and their opinion about whether a licence is  
advisable or not:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

(See, for example, what they have to say about the OSL.)

> I counsel my own clients to use no more than four licenses across  
> all of their Open Source work. The four are compatible with each  
> other and satisfy a range of different business purposes. There is  
> some argument about which four to use, but not about what they do.  
> IMO, all other than the four you happen to use are close to  
> redundant and provide little value.

Do you mean that there is a specific set of four that you recommend,  
or that you advise people to choose one each from four categories?   
In either case, what are the four licences or categories that you  
recommend?

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
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