Quoting Henrik Ingo ([email protected]): [revisiting CC0:]
> And me, and others... This was the quickly growing consensus. Including me, emphatically. For whatever that's worth. I note with appreciation Richard Fontana reminding us of the then-recent context of the MXM/MPEG-LA matter. That certainly makes his comments at the time very clear (again). At this remove, I can't recall clearly, but doubt that I engaged with l-r concerning MXM for reasons lost to time's passage. But, irrespective of that, Richard's point that there's probably been inconsistency in roughly similar cases based on bias for or against the proposer is doubtless well taken. I can only say that CC0 seemed an open-and-shut case, so I said so. If I'd been advised that very similar no-patent-grant wording in MXM had drawn hostility (did it?), then I'd have said 'Well, that's unfortunate, but I'm looking at only CC0 today, and the decision looks clear to me, so I'm not bothered by some _other_ commenters having previously disliked a different licence now claimed to have been similar.' The point is well taken, IMO, that the notion of l-r consensus being anything like dispositive should be approached with skepticism. On a separate matter, someone elsewhere in this thread had a useful taxonomy of positions in the OSI community on patents, which I don't have in front of me. FWIW, my own view[1] is: An open source licence is a necessary but not sufficient condition of covered software being open source. The licence conveys copyright and sometimes adjacent bundles of legal rights, but inherently can never solely suffice to determine the status of covered code. A limiting example can illustrate why: Today, I declare that a codebase is 2-clause BSD licensed. I post tarballs with compiled binaries. Somehow I just don't get around to posting source code, and it appears that, as far as observers can determine, I might be the only person to possess appropriate source trees, or perhaps in the worst case I might have been careless with a recursive rm operation and accidentally deleted all usable source trees. Is that software covered by an open source licence? Absolutely. Is the software open source? Not really until someone finds a source tree. Why? Because access to source code is yet another necessary but not sufficient condition for a codebase to be open source, in addition to licensing rights to copyright title and sometimes other things. Hypothetical #2: Now that someone has found the missing source code, it transpires that its algorithms are encumbered by strongly asserted patent rights (let's say, 'RAND' terms) in the Kingdom of Ruritania, and nowhere else. The newly discovered Ruthenian patent will expire December 31, 2019. With this revelation, is my open source code _still_ open source? I would say, yes, in all but one of the world's countries, as far as we know (absent further problems such as submarine patents in the Kingdom of Latveria). No in one country through the end of the year. Yes in that country starting New Year's Day. Implicit in my position is that whether a codebase is open source depends on whether OSD rights are prevented from being lawfully available on grounds of either impossibility (absence of source code) or any legal impediment that functions to nullify the licence's substantive rights conveyances. [1] I'm curious about regulars' assessment of this personal view, and of alternatives (including as to blind spots and errors). Thanks. (On the other hand, if I'm only belabouring the obvious, apologies for that.) -- Cheers, "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC). Step back Rick Moen from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet [email protected] they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating McQ! (4x80) the civilization you inherited." -- David Brin _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
