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

[John Cowan]

Russ Nelson scripsit:
> John Cowan writes:
>  > That's as much as to say: before the board acted, John Cowan shouldn't
>  > have been believed about the MS-PL and the MS-CL, whereas after
>  > the board action the same uncontroverted arguments about identical
>  > texts were somehow worthy of belief.
> 
> Basically, yes.

There speaks the voice of a "little group of willful men, representing no
opinion but their own": a self-selected and hieratic band of monopolists
who hope to preserve their power by obfuscation, a power which has not
even the dubious merit of accomplishing economic maldistribution, but
which exists solely to provide a few with the pleasure of enjoying it.

Or at least if it is not so, you are not providing any evidence of it.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

>  > Who died and appointed you God?
> 
> The people who look to us to answer the question "Is this software
> open source?"  That's .... pretty much everybody except a few grumpy
> people.

The OSI Approved list gives almost everybody almost everything they need.
It's unlikely that *any* newly submitted license will pass the "must
not be the same as X with special provision Y" test.  So what's the new
plan, Stan?

> No true open source developer would fail to believe us.

Is this a joke?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> How do we know that YOU are correct and EMSCo is incorrect?

In the same way that I know you mean "How do we know that YOU are correct
and EMSCo is incorrect?" by the above sentence and not, say "Mary had
a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow."

> I fear that you are waving your hands at the hermenutics of OSD
> compliance as if the problem didn't exist.  

I don't deny that there are problems of interpretation with the OSD.
But the claim that the OSI is Humpty Dumpty, and the OSD means what
(in each particular case) the OSI says it means, is nothing but rank
fundamentalism, with Russ Nelson as the William Jennings Bryan of the
movement.

> All this hand-waving accomplishes nothing.  The problems remain.

You would say that, wouldn't you?

-- 
Yes, chili in the eye is bad, but so is your    John Cowan
ear.  However, I would suggest you wash your    cowan at ccil.org
hands thoroughly before going to the toilet.    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --gadicath