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

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Wed Feb 18 04:25:58 UTC 2009


zooko writes:
 > Nobody suggested in the 60-day review that TGPPL is not OSD- 
 > conformant.

The license review process is more what you'd call "guidelines" than
actual rules.  The review takes as long as it takes.

 > If there is any reason to doubt that it is OSD- conformant, please
 > let me know right away

There are reasons beyond OSD conformance why we might not want to
approve the license.  Why?  Because we have a trademark to preserve.
If you can figure out some way to comply with the OSD in a way that
does not achieve the desired open source effect, which endangers the
meaning of OSI-Approved trademark, then we MUST deny your license OSI
approval (trademark law gives us no choice).

*Somebody* has to decide what OSD conformance means.  It's us.

Trust me on this one: we've given the plank to smart-asses before who
thought that strict OSD compliance (which technically doesn't even
require that you SHIP SOURCE CODE) was sufficient.

Anybody here think that a license which permitted distribution of all
the source code you didn't get would be approved?  I thought not.  And
yet that would comply with the OSD.

 > My recent summary of my understanding of this thread also states that  
 > the license-discuss review indicates that TGPPL is OSD-conformant:
 > 
 > http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:529:200902:ofpndmgcgmbhbmimpkpe

What license-discuss review?  You mean the license-review discussion?

This committee is advisory only.  The board makes the final decision.
In this case, I reported the board's decision shortly after it was
made a few weeks ago in Brussels.  Consequently, you can set aside any
previous discussion by this committee as inadequate because the board
has decided it was inadequate.

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