License Committee Report for September 2009

[Bruce Perens]

Giancarlo,

I have re-read the Falcon license. The license itself seems more clear 
than the commentary. But it does seem to do approximately what the LGPL 
does, with the addition of a weak provision for user-readable 
attribution which doesn't seem to reliably do what you think it does. 
The producer of a content management system that embeds Falcon might be 
required to place a mention of Falcon in its documentation before 
distributing it, but the creator of a web site would not be required to 
mention Falcon to protect his scripts because scripts for interpretation 
by Falcon can't be considered to be derivative works of Falcon.

So, the effect isn't really much greater than that of the straight LGPL, 
which requires distribution of the license statement with the product 
and the source code of the LGPL components on request, so anyone who 
recieved the distribution would know that Falcon was in the product if 
you used the LGPL.

The license currently falls short of "badgeware" licenses which require 
a logo on every web page. Those are potentially a problem because the 
number of badges required can become very large, and the one license 
close to badgeware that was approved by OSI after long argument ended up 
not being used by its submitter.

So, I don't yet believe that the approval of this license is worth its 
cost to the community, which is the increase of the combinatorial 
problem of mixing approved licenses. I am also having trouble accepting 
that this one weak provision is really critical to your business plans.

    Thanks

    Bruce