On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 4:27 PM Patrick Masson <mas...@opensource.org> wrote:
> We would like to add the following information to each license page: > > - License Copyright: [Name of person/organization who submitted the license, > and year submitted] Patrick, I would suggest: (1) keeping the submitter of the license separate from the copyright owner of the license (often these will be different, and I would consider the submitter much more important information); (2) only noting the copyright owner of a license where the license states a nominal copyright owner; (3) not making unverified assumptions about copyright ownership or authorship of an existing license text. For example, for the MIT license: (1) No submitter -- the MIT license was grandfathered in by the original OSI board (2) No nominal copyright owner (3) Despite its name, MIT does not appear to have authored the MIT license, based on the historical research I've done -- somewhat important because in later times I believe the MIT tech transfer office itself assumed -- based on the name popularized by the OSI itself -- that it had authored the MIT license, and also more recently some of the members of the "open source licenses can be copyright only" camp wish to argue that the MIT license should be read as a "copyright only" license because the present-day MIT tech transfer office supposedly takes that view. MIT is not the license steward of the MIT license -- there is no license steward -- which is separate from but closely related to the authorship and copyright ownership issue. For example, for GPLv3: (1) Submitted by Chris DiBona of Google in 2007 (if I remember correctly) (2) FSF is the nominal copyright owner My initial concern was that OSI was taking the position that OSI-approved licenses are normally copyrighted things, which as to at least some of them is questionable as a legal and policy matter. In practice, contractual language (for purposes of this discussion, open source licenses are a variety of contract) is widely reused and adapted freely as though it were in the public domain, and that should normally be considered a good thing. Richard _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
