Quoting Grahame Grieve (grah...@healthintersections.com.au): > The question for me is whether there's some useful middle ground. Is there > value in having an ethical use license where the creator gives up many but > not all rights, in a way that respects some core tenets of the open source > movement, and where the ethical restrictions are careful, and that this > place, while not proper open source, is still a recognisable benefit with a > name like Ethical Public Source or something? > > A different phrasing might be, do the managers of opensource.org believe in > all or nothing?
The implied suggestion of compromise is so common among (us) American citizens that I had to double-check your top-level domain, Grahame. ;-> Here in the USA, I long ago parodied that attitude on my 'lexicon' Web page, a page I maintain in (mostly) the style of Ambrose Bierce for entertainment purposes. Before getting to your substantive point, I'll just quote the lexicon page's entry about 'compromise', in hopes of getting a smile or two: Compromise Concept touted by American commentators as an inherently desirable approach to solving _other_ people's problems. (By contrast, all disputes touching on those commentators' _own_ interests are exempt -- as clearly entailing "important principles" that must be defended.) This guideline's Solomonic wisdom can be seen in the hypothetical example of you, the reader (unless, of course, you're American) being attacked by some thug attempting to kill you: A typical American observer might recommend a "fair compromise" of you being left _half-dead_. http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#compromise (Before hackles rise, I'll clarify that, despite Commonwealth Engish orthograpy, I _am_ American. For my sins.) Back to the subject at hand: The problem with implying that OSI might wish to settle for something, in hopes of avoiding getting nothing, is that, in my considered view, OSD articulates a _minimum floor_ of what licensing criteria are necessary and useful for open source to achieve what it and the free software movement aimed to do. Why, you ask? Because open source / free software is about the right to independently fork and continue to maintain an existing codebase for any purpose, for as long as any community with interest in that codebase finds it useful to do so. Before open source / free software came along, we all repeatedly went through the frustration of a valuable codebase getting suddenly either withdrawn from further availability, or orphaned permanently, or taken in bizarre directions by the copyright-holder, despite large and energetic crowds of coders standing ready to correct that situation -- coders who were foiled by never having gotten access to reserved copyright rights (redistribution and derivative works). This leads to the obvious gedankenexperment: The rights-holder of your favourite program just announced it will no longer be available and no more versions of any kind will ever emerge. Moreover, he/she says that _if_ a new version emerges, it would be illegal to use in any commercial context. The question: Do you and other existing users now have recourse? What is required in the way of conveyed rights for you-plural to have recourse? I submit that what's required for recourse, the ability to fork and fully maintain a codebase and continue to adapt it for any purpose even in the face of a malign (or deceased) rights-owner, is exactly the rights articulated in the OSD (and in the Debian Free Software Guidelines on which OSD is very closely based). And, my point: That infant, if divided Solomonically, isn't viable. We Linux users have seen what _can_ happen, in real time, when a codebase has starts out with less than that set of rights granted -- and where people make excuses and say 'Surely the whole infant isn't needed': It happened with BitKeeper (specifically the proprietary gratis-usage edition) over a period of years leading up to its EOLing in 2005. Over the years of its availability, BitMover gradually and incrementally increased restrictions. I trace these changes here: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html#bk And, because at no point was the code under an OSD-compliant licencce, there was no migration route away from that gradually developing problem short of writing a from-scratch replacement (which is what happened in April 2005; see: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html#git ). -- Cheers, 299792458 meters per second. Not Rick Moen just a good idea. It's the law. r...@linuxmafia.com McQ! (4x80 _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
