[License-review] Review: Zeppelin Public License

[McCoy Smith]

The text of this license, and the rationale for it, are quite confusing.

You’ve stated you want it to “fill the hole between permissive and weak-copyleft” but also that it is “a little bit more permissive” than the Apache license. Those two statements are mutually inconsistent (if it is intended to be somewhat weak-copyleft, it would be less “permissive” than Apache, assuming you’re using “permissive” as meaning “non-copyleft”).

Also, you contrast this with Apache (I assume in answer to the question of “Compare it to and contrast it with the most similar OSI-approved license(s)”) per the approval process requirements, but this license looks to be a variant of BSD-3.

There are parts of this license that potentially violate the OSD (or are drafted in an unclear way in which they could be interpreted to violate the OSD), including the requirement that “any contributions shall be licensed to the terms of the  license.” I suspect this is intended to capture derivative works or the like, but contributions could be separately copyrightable, and not a derivative work, and thus this provision would violate OSD 9 (“The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.”)

Sections 1 & 3 are also mutually contradictory, at least with respect to binaries, as Section 1 appears to require “contributions” to be licensed under the Zepplin license but Section 3 says that “You 

are not required to disclose the license in the binary form of the software.”

Section 5 is poorly drafted and inaccurate (“the addition of clauses (also known as sublicensing)” “modification of the  marked boilerplate components of the license”), and also potentially allows the license steward to change the terms of this license after-the-fact (“if the maintainer  of the origin, the removal of clauses”) to make it non-OSD compliant.

I know you say you can’t get a lawyer because of your age, but this one could really use lawyer input to make it clearer and to address the goals for this license, although I’d suggest first you might want to make clearer what the goals are here since at least in the first submission they aren’t clear and are mutually contradictory.

 

From: License-review <license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Not An FBI Agent via License-review
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2023 10:06 AM
To: license-review at lists.opensource.org
Cc: Not An FBI Agent <totallynotafed at fbi.ac>
Subject: [License-review] Review: Zeppelin Public License

 

Hello! I made my own license that I wish to submit for review. I have submitted the license in a text file on the e-mail, and it complies with the open-source standards. No projects currently use it other than the projects that I am currently making, which are in private GitHub repositories. I am also the license steward. The name of the license is Zeppelin Public License Version 1.0.

The gap that the project is to fill the hole between permissive and weak-copyleft, as I believe that while both are good, I prefer something in the middle. I believe that the most similar license to the Zeppelin Public License is the Apache License, and comparing and contrasting it shows that both the Apache License and the Zeppelin Public Licenses are permissive, both support the open-source movement, both support the rights of software creators, both support the rights of users, and both support the rights of derivative works. Some differences are that the Apache is extremely verbose whilst the Zeppelin Public License is shorter and simpler, as well as being a little bit more permissive. Unfortunately, due to my age, I could not get a lawyer to review the license, however after reading it a dozen of times, it seems legally plausible.

Thank you!

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