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

Brendan Hickey brendan.m.hickey at gmail.com
Wed Sep 26 10:55:20 UTC 2018


On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 6:36 AM, Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb at elstel.org>
wrote:

>
>
> On 9/26/18 11:29 AM, Bruce Perens wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> I do not see it as a mistake that no contributor agreement is necessary
> because of a clause of implicit consent. Anyone who wants to contribute can
> read the license and then decide if he wants to contribute.
>
> It is just more likely that the development process centers around the
> original authors with a license like this because the encouragement of
> these two groups of people may be different.
>
> Nonetheless I see this license as an encouragement to people who would
> otherwise not publish their software under an OSS license because it allows
> them to retain certain rights at least for the first time. If this should
> further encourage contributions the software can any time be re-published
> under a GPL or BSD like license.


There are at least three major problems with this license:

1. It violates the OSD.
2. It is not properly drafted and there's no indication that it was vetted
by an attorney familiar with software licensing.
3. It is redundant with existing licenses.

Even if this license was properly drafted, as Bruce and others have pointed
out it obviously fails prong 5 of the OSD:

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.


The C-FSL privileges one group ("original authors") over all others,
thereby failing to conform with the OSD. The facts being what they are this
license simply cannot be approved barring a complete rewrite and proper
legal review. Even with those things it should still be rejected on
proliferation grounds.

Brendan
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