[License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software License, Version 1.1 (C-FSL v1.1)

[Bruce Perens]

I don't recommend approval.

The main reason to reject is that this license allows an arbitrarily chosen
group (the original licensors are not necessarily the ones who do the most
work, etc.) to take the work of others private and release it under a
non-open-source licence, without using the more legally sound process of a
contributor license agreement. In particular, it allows the "original"
group to take forks private without the approval of anyone on the forked
project. Since Open Source projects can spawn entirely different, but
derivative, projects, this power can grow arbitrarily large.

This appears to be the stated goal of the license from the rationale
included in the submission.

I am currently working with a high-profile national laboratory on adding a
license to a federally-sponsored  currently GPL work. We just contact the
known authors asking for approval or objection and then we publish for
opposition, as was done for Mozilla, Wikipedia, etc. It has never been a
difficult process, it just takes some work and time. It worked for two of
our very largest projects.

The proposed license seeks to put this relicensing power in the hands of a
group that will surely be dead, if you wait long enough. it doesn't really
help with the continuing management of the project.

Despite the stated involvement of an attorney in _evaluating_ the license,
the language construction is sometimes vague and contradictory. Perhaps
this is due to an effort to make it simpler for non-attorneys. But it is
not clear to me that this is a work of authorship of a lawyer, or is that
an attorney, understanding the other tools available, would have felt this
licence is necessary. Thus rejection as a "crayon licence" is also possible.

Thanks

Bruce

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 9:58 AM Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb at elstel.org>
wrote:

> Full Name: Convertible Free Software License Version 1.1
> Short Identifier: C-FSL v1.1
> URL: https://www.elstel.org/license/C-FSL-v1.1.txt
>
> Rationale and Distinguish:
> While the BSD license allows the whole world to re-license and while
> re-licensing is virtually impossible with GPL since every contributor
> would need to consent the C-FSL license goes a practical intermediate
> way restricting the right to re-license to a group called the original
> authors. That way open source developers are not excluded from making
> business with others who want to base a proprietary product on the given
> piece of open source software.
>
> Proliferation Category & Legal Review:
> Other/Miscellaneous
> A lawyer from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, USA) has already
> checked C-FSL for its proliferation properties. He has found the license
> to be compatible with other open source licenses. He decided that C-FSL
> can be used together with the CC0 license in the FDtool (functional
> dependency mining tool) project.
>
> list of software which uses C-FSL v1.1.:
> qcoan: https://www.elstel.org/coan
> xchroot, confinedrv, bundsteg, debcheckroot, dbschemacmd: also found at
> www.elstel.org
>
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>
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