[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.2.0 released

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Thu Feb 21 14:17:27 UTC 2013


On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv at 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
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