For Approval: SSCL

Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel patrice-emmanuel.schmitz at be.unisys.com
Wed Jun 30 09:15:48 UTC 2010


In my humble opinion, the main issue is not licence proliferation itself, which we may all regret, but which is a definitive fact (with 1,800 F/OSS licenses tracked by BlackDuck in January 2010 !). The main issue is the lack of compatibility or interoperability between copyleft licenses, because it makes impossible the distribution of larger solutions (combined works).

Therefore, if any new license is copyleft (and it seems to be your case, as redistribution must reproduce the licence), it is important to add or clarify with something like this: "This license makes no obstacle to the integration of the source code as a component of a larger collective or combined work, when this work is distributed as a whole under the terms of another OSI-approved copyleft license".

Good luck!

Patrice-E. Schmitz 
Legal counsel - www.osor.eu

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Perens [mailto:bruce at perens.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 11:12 PM
To: Gregor Pintar
Cc: license-review at opensource.org
Subject: Re: For Approval: SSCL

The big hurdle for a license like this is that it doesn't cause license 
proliferation without justification. Look at the licenses that already 
have similar effects and are not too long.

Gregor Pintar wrote:
> Licence:
>
> Copyright (c) years, Company or Person's Name <E-mail address>
>
> Permission is hereby granted to use, copy, modify and/or distribute,
> this source code and binary programs
"derived from this source code"
> provided that the following
> conditions are met:
>
> - Redistributions of this source code, must retain that
> this licence text
>    and copyright notices are unchanged.
>   
You mean "must retain this license text and all copyright notices 
without alteration?" It's a little ungrammatical as stated.
> - Redistributions of binary programs which depend on this source code must
>    reproduce this licence text and copyright notices in the documentation.
>   
If there is not documentation, they don't have to reproduce them? Fix that.
> - If the binary program depends on a modified version of this source code,
>    you must to publicly release the modified version of this source code.
>   
Under a proprietary license? No, of course not, you mean "under this 
license, or a compatible license, or in the public domain without 
contractual restrictions".
> THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
> WARRANTY. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES
> ARISING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
>   
It would be kind of you to find an attorney to help you before you 
inflict this on the Open Source developers. As we saw with the Artistic 
License 1.0 and Bob Jacobsen, you can do a developer damage without 
planning to do so.

    Thanks

    Bruce




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