[License-review] OSI, legal conditions outside the "four corners" of the license, and PD/CC 0 [was Re: Can OSI specify that public domain is open source?]

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 01:37:51PM -0800, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> My tl;dr position, laid out in more detail below, is that OSI should
> be in the business of evaluating specific licenses, and not (to the
> greatest extent possible) external conditions around those licenses.
> As a result, OSI should evaluate and accept at least one PD license
> (ideally the CC0 PD dedication, and any other well-drafted dedication
> of similar style) as an OSI-approved license.

Apart from calling public domain dedications "licenses", my view is that
this is probably a good step to take.  I think the Unlicense might also
be a worthwhile public domain dedication to consider for certification.

An interesting thing about CC0 and Unlicense, though, is that they are
both a public domain dedication *and* a license (as a fallback in
jurisdictions where the public domain dedication "fails").

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]