[License-review] Legacy Approval: APL AROS Public License.

[Josh Berkus]

On 7/27/12 3:38 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> IMHO, the case for OSI evaluation of the AROS Public License is not very
> compelling.  We'd essentially be doing it because it's difficult for
> this particular code base to relicense :-), which isn't a very good
> reason to bring a new OSI-approved license into the world.

To be fair, this is the reason we approved The PostgreSQL License (TPL).
 That one is fairly similar to this case; the only differences were that:

a) TPL is used for more projects than just PostgreSQL, and

b) the PostgreSQL team went through an exercise first of determining the
possibility of relicensing (impossible, some of the copyright holders
are dead and others have no known contact information).

So I'd tend to say that if AROS makes a bona fide effort to contact
copyright holders and relicense, and finds it prohibitively difficult,
then we can reconsider the license.

I would like an attorney to weigh in on whether the AROS APL is actually
sufficiently identical to the MPL 1.1 to be called the MPL, though.  Or
is there something I'm not getting here?

--Josh