The Open Source Initiative has published a statement about license proliferation. According to the statement OSI introduces three new criteria that approved open source licenses must meet: They must be (a) non-duplicative, (b) clear and understandable and (c) reusable. Read more in the statement.
OSI changes criteria for license approvals
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Eugenia Loli
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does requirement “b) clear and understandable” mean that licenses which come with “Licensing FAQ” that’s longer than the license itself do not get OSI approved?
And: Will licenses get their approval revoked in retrospect?
GPL v3 will *not* be approved? It almost certainly will not meet the acceptence criteria as set out by the OSI, namely points two and three (clearly written, simple, and understandable to non-attorneys; reusability [not specifying the names of individuals or organizations]).
“the OSI, namely points two and three (clearly written, simple, and understandable to non-attorneys;”
it doesnt specify that any license should be understandable to non attorneys and gpl v3 does not exist so whether it will be OSI compliant or not cannot be determined at this point
and the third clause is that it should give any specific leverage or be partial to any company. the GPL is clearly compliant in this regard
It sounds like they’ll not revoke their approval so much as “Deprecate” it. It sounds like their position will be we approved it in the past but we don’t recommend you use it now.
If it works out the way it sounds this could be a good thing. The problem with licenses that are slight variations of others is becoming a real problem.
A FAQ doesn’t mean a license is unclear. Sometimes the clauses in licenses are subtle but there for good legal reason. The fact that the CDDL is so mis-understood here and at Slashdot is a good example, where people insist on bashing it after not studying it and believing all the critics who have financial interests in GPLed software (cough Bruce Perens cough).
There is a fallacy whenever people claim previous licenses are “clear,” because we have had years to become familiar with them. It took a long time for me to become comfortable with the provisions in the GPL and BSD licenses. Newer licenses are no different.
Public Domain/BSD/LGPL/GPL
The rest are crap and the OSI stamp of approval has been meaningless for a long time.
Michael
I agree, no organization has the right to say what license you want to use, unless they actually *wrote* the code.
emagius: We can’t comment on the GPL v3 since there have been no published drafts yet. hubertf: No licenses’ approval will be revoked because that would be clearly unfair to anybody using it. If we do find that nobody is using a license, though, I would try to convince my fellow board members that revocation is prudent. Michael: the fact that more people rely on OSI’s approval is disproof of your thesis.
-russ
I’d like for you to clarify this statement you made.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138002&cid=11544316
I’m glad that you didn’t get the trademark on “open source” and I find it ridiculous that you think that you have the moral authority to stop people from “misusing” the term open source.
That comment almost sounded Stallman-like…very scary.
I don’t like how the OSI is trying to play a political role in the community. IMHO they should just give a yeah or nay on whether a specific license in OpenSource (TM) or not. So if I wan to have a license identical to the GPL with the stipulation that it cannot be linked to any GPL library and requires the licensee to say “RMS is a douchebag” three times then they should still certify it. After all the ISO, IEEE, and ANSI dno’t champion and advertise their standards, they just standardise them. IMHO thats all the OSI should do.
I guess a couple corporates will care about OSI’s “approval”, but for the most part businesses and individuals will use whatever license they deem fit and don’t care about approval from OSI. Once again, we’re getting certain people wanting to control open source.
“Public Domain/BSD/LGPL/GPL
The rest are crap and the OSI stamp of approval has been meaningless for a long time.”
Well, Apache is such a giant meaningless one.
MIT, too.
How can you say that license proliferation is not a problem? I study the different licenses and I agree that there are too many with very minor and fairly insignificant differences that don’t help spread open source. Besides they’re not saying you can’t use your license, it just might not be OSI approved, which means that the corporate distros probably wouldn’t package your software, unless it was a program that just blows everything else out of the water.
Plus, what other organization can even begin to sort out license proliferation in a fairly neutral fashion? Red Hat, OSDL, FSF, GNU, IBM? This will help out programmers to see what their rights are when reusing code from various projects, especially since the OSI is trying to deal with patents as well.
That’s pretty much been the claim of FUD folks since RMS announced revisions to the original GPL. As for “points 2 and 3”, “clearly written, simple, and understandable to non-attorneys; reusability” the GPL has not suffered these problems as of yet, especially compared to you typical “standard” software licenses.
I mean, the GPL is pretty basic (if you use the code, you can’t pretend its your own), and the “revisions” only add extra items like the LGPL, and other item to clarify that the GPL has no intention of “stealing” code that has nothing to do with GPL’d code. Actually, the revisions only tend to add options for folks who are too short-sighted to appreciate the benefits of the GPL.
In that sense, it’s kind of funny and sad that SUN and MS spend so much time FUDing the GPL, when it’s creators spend most of their efforts to bend over backwards to make sure the license is fair to all users. And in comparison, when is the last time a proprietary software company altered their license to comfort their user base?
(I know, only a few months ago, because a (nameless) company overstepped their bounds and made the mistake of assuming all user data should become the property of that company. However, I meant a company voluntarily altering their license without customers hunting them down with pitchforks and torches…)
From: CaptainPinko (.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com)
I don’t like how the OSI is trying to play a political role in the community. IMHO they should just give a yeah or nay on whether a specific license in OpenSource (TM) or not.
From: Larry (.de)
Once again, we’re getting certain people wanting to control open source.
On the surface, it might look this way.
However, if the OSI didn’t engage in advocacy activities the OSD would be worthless. Here’s the key question: is a ‘balkanised’ world, where incompatibilities between open source licenses prevent code reuse and project interoperability, truly an open source one?
“That strategy worked well in 1998, as a way of giving people a place that felt safe within which to rethink their assumptions. But seven years later, we think it is is significant that the original corporate open-source license, the Mozilla Public License, has been dropped by its originating organization in favor of the GPL. It is becoming increasingly clear from this and other examples that the “middle way” represented by Mozilla and other corporate open-source licenses is not a stable, effective solution even from the point of view of selfish corporate agents.
These licenses put a hard brake on the growth of development communities around their products without actually delivering measurable advantages in revenue, market control, or risk management. Because these licenses have largely failed to deliver, the same corporate players that originally promoted them are now among those voicing the loudest complaints about the proliferation of licenses and the legal complexity created by license collisions.
Therefore, we believe that the best way for us to serve the corporations and the entire open-source community is to go back to first principles and insist on reusability without qualifications and a general flattening of legal barriers.”
Welcome back, OSI, welcome back.
I think it’s great to see the OSI take this direction. Just like W3C has defined older HTML-tags as deprecated it will be a nice guiding line for developers when we can see what is deprecated and what’s not.
Besides that the GPL v2 contains everything we need for true free software (btw: the problem with free meaning gratis does not exist in Denmark – it’s mostly a problem for english speaking people).
I have maximun faith in OSI.