One of my colleagues (who strongly prefers public domain dedications and permissive licenses) recently indicated to me that in his opinion as a software author, the obligation to distribute source code qualified as 'consideration', since it requires a tangible (to some degree) action on the part of the licensee. I had never thought about it this way, but I can definitely see how someone could arrive at that conclusion, and this seems to align with Florian's concern.
On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 9:14 AM Florian Weimer <f...@deneb.enyo.de> wrote: > > * Lawrence Rosen: > > > But let us nevertheless agree on a pragmatic definition of "open > > source software". > > > “Open source software” means software actually distributed under terms > > that grant a copyright and patent license from all contributors to the > > software for every licensee to access and use the complete source > > code, make copies of the software or derivative works thereof and, > > without payment of royalties or other consideration, to distribute the > > unmodified or modified software. > > I think “consideration” is a bad word, it's difficult to understand > for those of us who were not brought up in the English legal > tradition. > > I'd be worried that “no other consideration” would exclude copyleft > licenses, or more broadly speaking, licenses that use copyright as a > tool to get the licensee to perform any additional action that is not > inherently tied to exploitation of the copyright itself. > > _______________________________________________ > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@lists.opensource.org > http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
