Dear Mr. Brown: It is evident from checking your e-mail address that you're the Vice-President Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Toqueville Institute who recently dipped that organisation's toes into open source with an "analysis" paper[1]. Welcome to license-discuss.
I've noticed that all of your posts to this mailing list to date have been, in essence, unadorned advocacy against use of the GNU General Public License by, one gathers, software engineers and those who employ them. Along the way, you've asserted that use of that licence negates ownership. You've vaguely suggested without evidence (or specifics) that that licence is at risk of being overturned in court, and that for unstated reasons the developers might not get credit for the work. You've promoted a legally unsupportable maximalist notion of what it means to "own" a copyright (while missing the irony that no software has ever been subject to such a bundle of rights, and probably never will be). You've mostly ignored cogent and helpful clarifications such as Wendy Seltzer's, Jown Cowan's, and Larry Rosen's, and gone straight back to advocacy. In short, you've been doing something of a Beltway Bandit lobbyist dance for us. What I'm left wondering is... why? The members of this mailing list conduct it not to advocate particular open-source licence over others, but rather to analyse proposed licences in light of OSI's Open Source Definition and surrounding legal issues. There are real issues we're discussing, such as mechanisms for registering licence assent, the adequacy of rights grants as opposed to contracts, and whether the OSD should address use restrictions (and how) -- not to mention discussion of several submitted licences, including two of Larry's (OSL and AFL). Maybe it's just me, but it strikes me that you, Ken Brown, not liking the GNU GPL really doesn't go especially well with the rest of those topics. [1] Referring to Mr. Brown's "Opening the Open Source Debate" white paper. http://www.roaringpenguin.com/adti2.php3 This would be the same institute that in June issued a separate white paper suggesting, to quote Internet News, "that terrorists may find it easier to hack U.S. networks run on open source infrastructure." http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1276831 -- Cheers, There are only 10 types of people in this world -- Rick Moen those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
