Quoting Grahame Grieve (grah...@healthintersections.com.au): [OSD #6: No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavor.]
> This precludes discrimination against illegal activities, either in the > source or user jurisdiction, right? Has this ever been tested in court? > (E.g. an open source library that was a key contributor to empowering an > illegal activity is targeted for allowing that use in it’s license). Mu. (Meaning no personal criticism, your question appears to rest on an incorrect assumption, hence cannot be technically answered either yes nor no.) I don't think crime is deemed a field of endeavour within the meaning of OSD's usage, for starters. Beyond that: If there have been licences submitted for OSI Certified approval that specifically denied the grant of legal rights to persons using the code for unlawful purposes, I cannot recall those at the moment. It seems to me that a licensor would achieve nothing by inserting that purported restriction. AFAIK, it's not the copyright stakeholder's moral or legal burden to deal with crime, nor does the stakeholder have any obligation to try, nor any advantage to so doing. Heck, the stakeholder cannot be expected to even predict or know about illegal modes of usage in the innumerable jurisdictions around the world, let alone be accountable. Crime is what we have law enforcement for, not what we have software licensors for. [OSD #5: No Discrimination against Persons or Groups.] > Further, the discussion on #5 specifically calls out ‘the process’ not just > the software (though the discussion on #6 doesn’t). For reference, you're talking about comments at the 'Annotated' version of OSD, at https://opensource.org/osd-annotated. > I’m not sure how to understand that. Say I got a PR that specifically > made it possible to break the law using the source code. (I haven’t > had such a PR, but there are places in my source where this could be > done since my source is enforcing the law in places). Is the intent of > the OSD that such a PR should be accepted since there should be no > prejudicial treatment? I suspect not, but I feel as though some better > explanation would be helpful. I see no reason to think that OSD attempts to bar you from implementing whatever policies you like, about incoming code pull requests. OSD #5 is concerned with gratuitous 'locking out' (to borrow the annotated text's phrase) of particular groups or persons via restrictions written into the licence terms themselves. As I've mentioned recently in this space, the fundamental right to fork that underlies all open source / free software codebases means that any obstructive project rules and practices can be, in the words of the late John Perry Barlow, treated as damage and routed around. E.g., if you or I decree that we are going to enact a prejudicial regime of some sort concerning further development of the codebase under your/my supervision, anyone objecting to your/my policy is free to ignore that policy and act differently concerning that person's own code instance and develop it differently. -- Cheers, "Maybe the law ain't perfect, but it's the only Rick Moen one we got, and without it we got nuthin'." r...@linuxmafia.com -- U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, circa 1875 McQ! (4x80) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
