[License-review] Support for SSPL v2

Nigel T nigel.2048 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 19 00:35:21 UTC 2018


Well, there are quite a few non-commercial academic use only scientific
software packages.  Some with source, some without.  There are communities.

As far as the popularity of NC licenses...seems like CC-NC has a good
following. There isn't a commonly used NC software license so we have a
hodgepodge of individual academic use licenses and communities.

It seems odd to me that folks would think that the concept of "Hey you can
use my stuff for free but if you make money off it, I'd like a share" would
be unpopular if it were as easy an option to pick for OSS as it is in the
CC model.

As far as educational vs academic goes academic licensing is a thing
separate from the FOSS community and "academic" is probably as commonly
used as "educational" in that context.


On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 6:30 PM Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 6:07 AM Nigel T <nigel.2048 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Frankly, this is just an end run around the fact that non-commercial
>> licenses aren’t considered to be open source.
>>
>
> Yes. I think we need to reiterate that OSI doesn't prevent you from using
> any license. Just don't call it Open Source. If people find it compelling
> enough, they will use it.
>
> The problem is generally that the license is *not *sufficiently
> compelling to build a community, and the submitter believes it will
> magically become so if OSI sprinkles approval fairy dust upon it.
>
> I disagree that academic/NC licenses aren’t open source but that’s the way
>> it’s been.
>>
>
> You mean educational-use-only. This community uses "academic" to refer to
> the BSD/MIT style of license and in general ones without copyleft.
>
> The rules of Open Source were first designed for the Debian distribution
> of Linux, and then found wider adoption. One of the goals was for everyone
> to be able to use Debian, without having to hire a lawyer just to be able
> to run the software. Inclusion of educational use only software would have
> severely restricted the audience for the Debian distribution. Having been
> adopted by a wider community than Debian, this is extended to mean that
> everybody can run Open Source software for any purpose and should not have
> to hire a lawyer just to run it. Which seems to have a very broad buy-in.
>
> One has to ask where is the educational-use-only community, and how are
> they promoting themselves? Nobody's stopping them. What I see is that some
> individual programs have small communities, but there is no aggregation of
> them to promote the concept of educational-use-only software.
>
> So, IMO the problem for some of the proposed licenses is not a lack of
> OSI's approval, but a lack of interest.
>
>     Thanks
>
>     Bruce
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