[License-review] Approval: BSD + Patent License

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

Is there any reason then to approve this license if the FSF does not
explicitly state it is GPL V2 compatible?


Why guess?  There¹s no point in approving a niche license that doesn¹t
actually fulfill its niche.

My opinion is step 1 is to submit to the FSF for approval rather than
the OSI since it appears it passes here other than for proliferation.
If the FSF publically says it¹s GPL v2 compatible then approval here
should be relatively straightforward.

Regards,

Nigel

On 1/18/16, 3:32 AM, "License-review on behalf of Mark Wielaard"
<license-review-bounces at opensource.org on behalf of mark at klomp.org> wrote:

>On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:03:33AM -0800, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>> McCoy is proposing a BSD license plus patent license. It is an okay
>> FOSS license. But AFL 3.0 did that very thing 10 years ago. The only
>> reason for AFL 3.0 not being accepted generally for that same purpose
>> is the FSF's complaint, "contains contract provisions." That kind of
>> quasi-legal balderdash is directly relevant to what McCoy and others
>> want to do. 
>> 
>> And if AFL 3.0 isn't satisfactory for some random reason, then use
>> the Apache 2.0 license.
>
>Sorry Larry, but these are impractical suggestions wrt reviewing the
>license submission and intent of the BSD + Patent License. The AFLv3
>is GPL incompatible because it contains contract provisions requiring
>distributors to obtain the express assent of recipients to the license
>terms. The extra restrictions making ASLv2 incompatible with GPLv2 have
>already been discussed. Both are clearly documented cases of expressly
>incompatible licenses by the GPL license steward the FSF. I understand
>your desire to mention your disagreement with the license steward and
>discuss alternative legal interpretations of what it means to be
>compatible with the GPL then what might be generally accepted and
>used in practice. But it is offtopic and not a very constructive
>discussion in the context of this license submission, which doesn't
>contain any of those extra restrictions.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Mark
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