On 2/25/2024 1:41 PM, Dirk Riehle wrote:
Hi Pamela, all:
In June 2023, the License Review Working Group completed its work
revising the license review process. There was an outstanding task
that grew out of the Working Group, which was to create tags for the
approved licenses that could be used as an aid in filtering approved
licenses for their characteristics.
There are two stages to this task. The first stage is to create a
list of tags to be attached to licenses. There is already a
preliminary list
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1svyrUgE6xwzaNO4xnhTT0-pHPblwBm__BArtttkQWxk/edit?usp=sharing>,
so we should be able to complete this task in a fairly short period
of time.
I looked at the list and wondered about its purpose. The tags doesn't
say anything about rights, presumably they are all the same for open
source licenses. But they also don't say anything about disclaimers
and prohibitions?
If this is primarily about obligations, I wanted to point out that
German lawyers created a comprehensive system for explaining license
obligations, including instructions on how to fulfill them, using some
form of pseudo code ("if this do that"). I'm talking about the OSADL
folks though I think this stuff is still paywalled.
I'm not sure the OSI is up for it but some authoritative model of
license obligations and how to fulfill them would be great. The tags
don't have to state how the obligations should be fulfilled, however,
their completeness and quality would make it much easier to develop
such instructions based on an authoritative ontology (hierarchical
list of tags).
I should have been clearer about that list. That was about 10 minutes of
brainstorming and will be reconsidered and refined as part of this task.
I think that there aren't rights listed because any open source license
is a grant of all rights with some return obligations, rather than any
limitation on the rights granted. But I would be interested to hear if
that's not true.
What do you mean by "disclaimers and prohibitions"? Can you give me
examples of what you believe fall into that category? There is a variety
of choices for copyleft, which I might consider "prohibitions," but what
are you thinking of?
One thing we're not undertaking is to provide advice on compliance,
license choice, etc. There are several reasons for that, one of which is
that advice in those areas is fact-specific and will often require the
exercise of legal judgment, which is not the OSI's role. Instead, we
intend for the tags to be tools that those who do provide that advice
can use to help them in their advising work.
Pam
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