License Committee Report for September 2009

[Bruce Perens]

This could be an example of the problem of non-attorney-written licenses 
which do even their own authors a disservice because they don't work as 
expected in court. I submit that for OSI to approve a license, there 
should be an attorney willing to stand up for it and either explain why 
its terms or necessary or repair them. OSI, IMO, currently does 
developers a disservice by accepting (and thus, placing its imprimatur 
upon) licenses which are legal trash.

    Thanks

    Bruce

Will Robertson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 16/11/2009, at 4:21 AM, Giancarlo Niccolai wrote:
>
>> Finally, we're integrating Falcon into third party products which 
>> are, btw,
>> not fully GPL compatible, as Titanium appdeveloper, Ogre 3d engine 
>> and several
>> commercial products.
>
> I'm a novice in the details of all of these licensing matters, but 
> your original FPLL to me sounded rather similar to the LGPL, with some 
> odd restrictions such as:
>
>> In example, if You use Falcon to drive a web site, and You don't want 
>> Your site visitors to ever see Your scripts, You have to put 
>> somewhere a reading like "Powered with Falcon".
>
> Perhaps I'm missing something obvious though; can you outline why the 
> LGPL doesn't suit your needs?
>
> Regardless, if you're creating an all new FPLL then it's probably 
> worth waiting for that one rather than discussing the old.
>
> -- Will
>