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

[Michael Tiemann]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>wrote:

> The time period should not be variable but some agreed upon balance between
> potential business needs and common good.  A pragmatic question that will
> ultimately be "arbitrary" but hopefully based on consensus what is, in fact,
> reasonable.  Postulating 12 seconds or 12 years is unhelpful except as an
> exercise in reductio ad absurdum.


I disagree.  There are many very earnest Quakers who simply cannot bring
themselves to join the open source movement because they refuse to
contribute to something that they cannot restrict from being used to kill
other people.

You may think the less of a Quaker because they join the open source
movement anyway, or you may think the more of them.   But the fact is that
the unrestricted use permissions granted by the OSD are a Big Deal to some
people.  But again, the OSD was drafted as it was specifically because we
did not want to make the OSI some moral arbiter in what was or was not
acceptable use, even though killing people is something most of us find
utterly abhorent.

The 12 month period is perfectly arbitrary, and would put the OSI in an
impossible position of agreeing to one business convenience while
disallowing others.  It's not our role to provide such convenience, but
rather to uphold the standards of the open source community, in discussions
like these, and ensure that if we approve something, it conforms to those
standards.  I don't like the idea of creating exceptions to those standards,
even for a period of limited time, even for a business that is doing
worthwhile things.

M