I really don’t want to relitigate this but my recollection was that

a) the terms that were deemed questionable existed in the already approved 1.3 
and

b) a significant part of the discussion wasn’t regarding whether it met the OSD 
but whether the government had need to retain those terms to follow regulations 
and that the terms made the license less reusable as a general purpose license. 
 Which struck me as a particularly specious argument for a license in the 
special purpose license.

If you believe my recollection is incorrect it’s in the archives and you can 
correct me. But the fact remains that a license update from a major open source 
contributor was held up by one individual for years...

Is it necessary to denigrate NASA lawyers operating in good faith to update an 
already OSI approved license they drafted as “random IP lawyers” and somehow 
unfamiliar with the open source domain?

Because that strikes me as seriously unproductive.


From: John Cowan <co...@ccil.org<mailto:co...@ccil.org>>
Date: Sunday, Mar 17, 2019, 6:20 PM
To: license-discuss@lists.opensource.org 
<license-discuss@lists.opensource.org<mailto:license-discuss@lists.opensource.org>>
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] The per se license constructor



On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 10:05 AM Tzeng, Nigel H. 
<nigel.tz...@jhuapl.edu<mailto:nigel.tz...@jhuapl.edu>> wrote:

Again, speaking only for myself, but I find it interesting that the need for 
legal review is considered so important but when a practicing IP lawyer in a 
specific domain claims that certain license constructs are required to meet the 
required regulations for a governmental agency that laypersons can simply say 
“Nope” and that’s pretty much the end of that.

The "Nope" means "Nope, it doesn't conform to the OSD", not "Nope, it doesn't 
conform to the regulations."  If the regulations prevent release as open 
source, so be it.

And random practicing IP lawyers, like other lawyers, are used to drafting 
documents that preserve their client's rights as opposed to giving them away.  
That can't be an easy thing to wrap one's head around.

--
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        
co...@ccil.org<mailto:co...@ccil.org>
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic
arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
                --Philip Guedalla
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