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

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 06:11:24PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Christopher Schmidt (crschmidt at metacarta.com):
> 
> > How is that? Open source is a term. TGPPL is not an OSI Approved
> > License, and until TGPPL is a OSI Approved, it is a violation of the
> > trademark usage guidelines to use that, but thee is no similar trademark
> > on "Open Source", according to anythign I've read.
> 
> I was _going_ to say:
> 
> You would be making a grave mistake if you think that trying to call
> something with even _arguable_ OSD-compliance problems "open source" is
> in the interest of you or your firm.  I strongly suggest you not commit
> that error, if you don't wish to have a severe and ongoing public
> relations problem.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said? I said I release Open
Source software, where the definition of "Open Source Software" is
"software which is released under a license which is compliant with the
Open Source Definition according to legal review". 

It seems clear to me from watching this list over the past two years
that there is a limited relationship between "Meeting the OSD" and
"Being approved by OSI" -- because OSI has a policy of encouraging
license submitters to not submit licenses which may be similar to
existing ones. This is understandable, but given that, I can't
(personally) seriously accept that the definition of 'open source'
should be limited to a set of licenses that are managed by OSI. 

It is possible that the TGPPL is arguably OSD-non-compliant. If that is
the case, I apologize; my understanding was not that anyone has decided
it is not complaint, but instead that it is not going to become an OSI
approved license for other reasons. If the former is true -- that is,
that the license is arguably non-complaint -- then I withdraw my
statement with regard to calling it open source, because that would be a
foolish thing to do. I still maintain that just because something is not
yet approved by OSI does not make software under that license not open
source if it is clearly compliant with the OSD.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta