[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 5:07 PM Michael Dolan
<mdolan at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> As this review moves toward the committee/board's deliberation, I want to offer one observation about the standard being applied. Lawyers on this list will recognize the flavor of this debate from US constitutional practice, where textualists and originalists argue over how to read a governing text. On the OSD, happily, the two schools converge. The OSD's text contains no provision addressing termination triggers. And the approval practice from the era of the OSD's adoption shows that none was understood: this body approved a license terminating on any intellectual property infringement claim (OCLC-2.0), licenses terminating in their entirety upon any patent action against the licensor, related to the software or not (RPSL-1.0, Watcom-1.0), and, in the modern era, a license terminating all permissions upon suits against any recipient (CAL-1.0).

Not sure if you have already responded on the CAL-1.0 point but I
still don't see how CAL-1.0 is parallel to OpenMDW-1.1. It's another
patent litigation-triggered termination case.

I would note the OSI says: "Approval of a license with the same or
similar terms in the past does not bind the OSI to approval of a newly
submitted license."

> I have tried to anchor every response in this thread to text: the license's text, the OSD's text, and approved precedent.

> Some of the remaining objections, thoughtful as they are, rest instead on views about what open source licenses ought to do about copyright enforcement. That is a legitimate and important policy conversation, and the OSI is an appropriate place to have it. However, I think this discussion is more appropriately labeled as a conversation about amending the OSD or the written review criteria, to be had prospectively, rather than a conformance standard applied for the first time to a pending submission that meets the previously published requirements.

Possibly. I'm not sure. The previously published requirements include
the requirement to ensure that the license "provide[s] software
freedom", and the OSI says that "consensus [of people on
license-review] that a license does not ensure software freedom may,
in some cases, be the justification for rejecting a license even where
they cannot identify a specific aspect of the OSD or the approval
guidelines below that is not met". That language originated around the
end of the time when I was on the OSI board, and I remember it being
done in response to a number of license submissions at the time,
particularly, I think, from what I might call relatively sophisticated
submitters, who were making arguments about how the OSI was compelled
to approve some problematic license because no one could identify a
specific provision in the OSD that it literally violated. One person
on license-review (Simon Phipps) has explicitly said they don't think
OpenMDW-1.1 provides software freedom. I might argue that broader
concerns about software freedom underlie the concerns being raised by
others (including me). I'm not sure I agree with how Simon framed it
but I think he is probably seeing the same underlying problem I and
some others are seeing. I don't think I've articulated my concerns
especially well, but Pam did so in her last message.

Richard