On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org> wrote:
On 21/02/13 05:40, Richard Fontana wrote:

>> Who decides? That sounds like a recipe for lawyer argument. Is it better
>> to refer to the OSI license list as of a certain date instead?
>
> That was essentially what an earlier release did (IIRC). I'm really
> trying to define what 'proprietary licensing' is and I don't know a
> good way to do it. And the goal here isn't perfection, but rather to
> ward off practitioners of certain kinds of business models. I just
> want a way to signal "keep away" to a certain kind of potential
> licensor. The definition doesn't have to be perfect for that purpose.
>
> That said, I'm not satisfied that this can't be made better, including
> perhaps in the way you've suggested.

I think that having a clearly defined list is much easier. Then it's
pretty obvious to all. In the current set up, I can imagine someone
wanting to take advantage of that clause thinking "Hmm, I don't think
their pseudo-open license meets the OSD, but they do. So what now?"
Pseudo-open is currently observed (if not common), and we should plan
for it possibly remaining so.

What about the Fedora list? Or on any one of the Debian, OSI or Fedora lists? Even if you disagree with the judgment of a particular list it will be a very fringe case, and I agree with Gerv that certainty is better than uncertainty in this case.

> This is just a clarification of what kinds of things absolutely are
> not 'Legal Notices'. It isn't meant to be exhaustive, but I did
> recently add 'Powered by statements' because that is such a common
> form in which I've seen the problematic condition.

I wonder if we can think of a more generic phrase. Or we could go for
the slightly linguistically ugly '"Powered by"-style statements.' Or you
could try leaning on the legal definition of what makes a valid
copyright statement, and say you only have to preserve those.

I think the problem is that some licenses require preservation of "attribution" statements. That's not necessarily the same as the name of the copyright owner in the copyright notice, so we can't limit it to preserving copyright notice only. 

Pam