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

[Michael Tiemann]

We can all make mistakes, such as following the wrong branch of a
counter-factual argument.  Of course the OSI can make mistakes--we did with
the first supposedly open source license that Apple submitted to us.  But in
the case of this argument, the MS-HUGELY-PROPRIETARY license is not a test
of whether the OSI would properly reject it or not.  It's a question of who
should believe what when the OSI rejects such a license and Microsoft (in
the case of the example) asserts that it is open source anyway.  That was
the original question.

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

> Thorsten Glaser writes:
>  > Russ Nelson dixit:
>  >
>  > >What happens when Microsoft decides that the MS-HUGELY-PROPRIETARY
>  > >license is OSD-compliant?
>  >
>  > What if it is? You all are human beings too and thusly can err.
>
> Ahh, now we're getting into the interesting questions of
> hermeneutics.  Can we, in fact, make mistakes on the interpretation of
> a document we wrote?  Perhaps not.
>
>  > In the end, OSD compliance is determined by the person wondering
>  > if he can use said piece of work (or his lawyers).
>
> If people have to do that, we're not doing our job.
>
> --
> --my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com
> Cloudmade supports http://openstreetmap.org/
> 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-323-1241
> Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  |     Sheepdog
>