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

[Bruce Perens]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 9:34 AM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 11:27 AM, Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:
>
> In your license, you are asking for an *unrelated* program to be made
>> Open Source due to a condition predicated on a specific form of use.
>> Besides being clearly against OSD # 6 (and sorry, OSI is not now required
>> to announce this obvious fact),
>>
>
> I don't see this.  If OSD #6 means, or is interpreted to mean, "no
> discrimination against particular tasks", then I can see it, and that's a
> license prohibition I would support.  But I have trouble reading it into
> the text of #6.  Can you explicate?
>

Here is the relevant L0-R text:


*5. If you run this software to analyze, modify, or generate     software,
you must release source code for that software.*

Analysis, modification, and generation of software are a field of endeavor
under OSD # 6. OSD #2 says the *program *must include source code, so it
overrides any provision in OSD # 6 that would prevent the program from
having source code. But not *other *programs. So, GPL OK, King Midas not OK.

We strengthen this with OSD # 9 requiring that the license not bind to
other software that is simply distributed with the Open Source.

So, although you could argue that combination of source code with your
GPL-licensed program is a field of endeavor under OSD # 6, OSD # 2 says the
program has to have source code, so that argument would fail. It would not,
however, fail when the source code in question is not part of the program,
and thus not required to be in source code form under OSD # 2.

If anyone at the time had seriously proposed that the program compel Open
Sourcing of anything it processed as input, I would probably have included
that in # 9 as well. But the prospect was so absurd that I did not consider
it.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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