On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:43:27AM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 21/05/13 04:27, Richard Fontana wrote:
> Probably not *too* much of a problem, and I think a nice political
> solution. The inspiration here is the 'Rule of Two' that the Software
> Freedom Conservancy is said to use in judging the membership fitness
> for potential member projects.
This Rule of Two?
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rule_of_Two
Ah, I'm somewhat pleased to discover there's a Star Wars reference. I
can't understand why Bradley and Karen didn't allude to it in the FaiF
podcast that presented my LinuxCon NA 2012 talk (where I talked about
the 'Rule of Three' and how it became the 'Rule of Two' -- I thought I
was coining those phrases).
> The best alternative would be to have a small list of
acceptable
> licenses, an expansion of the former approach taken with the Apache
> License 2.0. Given the tendency in modern code towards use of standard
> licenses this might be an okay approach (somewhat reminiscent of the
> MySQL "FLOSS license exception").
I am (cautiously, bearing in mind Luis' point) in favour of this, as a
mechanism to promote best-practice modern licenses.
I am not too concerned about Luis's point only because license
upgrades seem to be so infrequent (something I've suggested may be a
problem, but I don't think it is likely to change).
Additional question: non-copyleft licenses don't require the
provision
of source. If I send you a distribution which is mostly copyleft-next
but contains a BSDed library, and send you only the binaries of the
BSDed part, and say "here's the binary; it's under the BSD licence",
that would be "Distribut[ing] a Covered Work incorporating material
governed by a license that is both OSI-Approved and FSF-Free as of the
release date of this License, provided that Your Distribution complies
with such other license", but you still wouldn't have the source...
Oh, *that* (unlike your previous issue) was something I thought about.
At least the way I am currently looking at it: I have to provide the
source for the BSD library, because I still have to satisfy the
separate conditions for object code distribution, which apply to the
Derived Work (which we're assuming somehow encompasses the BSD
library). But I also wondered whether failing to make clear that this
was so might be suboptimal, and that may indeed be so. (Possibly the
solution I am thinking of for improving the issue previously raised,
which is to move section 4 para. 2 into section 3, could also address
this.)
- RF