[License-review] For Approval: Rewrite of License Zero Reciprocal Public License

[Bruce Perens]

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 2:49 PM, Kyle Mitchell <kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:

>
>
> If Open Source licenses can hook copyleft into distribution, why can't
> they hook copyleft into use?


IMO, OSD # 6 catches your use cases and thus your proposal is not an Open
Source license.

But the real question here is not whether your proposed license meets the
OSD. It is the fact that it is in absolutely nobody's interest to ever
accept the license as presently written, because it asks for too much. It
asks for an unreasonable compliance burden of the user, and it asks of
someone who actually owns a copyright to some work to Open Source that work
simply for the benefit of using your program.

I can conceive that a software developer receives such great value when
they incorporate someone else's code into their product. So that's where I
drew the line, and in this I was following the previous work of Richard
Stallman and the authors of various licenses the Debian project was
accepting.

And thus, even if this license met the OSD, which I don't believe it does,
for OSI to certify it would be dereliction of their duty to the community.

So, I wonder if you are trying to engage us in some sort of Socratic
discussion? Certainly you are capable of thinking through the consequences
of your own license as I have. You appear to have scrapped the previous
version of your license that you might have made OSD compliant with my
advice, removing consequences based on use. In its place, I see *yet
another pass at incorporating use into your terms.*

I can confidently say that you have exhausted this path.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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