Just my opinion, but I'm not sure this would be particularly useful, and
might hinder future license discussions more than help. I think it is
enough to say that all licenses being considered must conform completely
to the OSD, and that issues outside of that should be considered on a
case-by-case level.
Participants in a discussion are already free to point to "case law," to
point out that issues under discussion were or were not approved
previously.
Christine Hall
Publisher & Editor
FOSS Force: Keeping tech free
http://fossforce.com
On 7/3/19 10:13 AM, VanL wrote:
Raising this comment to a new thread.
Many of the things we are discussing could be resolved, or at least
helped, by elevating certain interpretive principles as "canons of
construction" that would guide analysis. This approach does not require
amending the OSD directly, but instead creating a body of literature
that helps all parties reason about it. For example, the comment below:
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 12:55 PM Pamela Chestek <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
As to "where in the OSD," I disagree with your framing that every
license must be approved unless we can point to a specific rule broken.
"Out of scope" is a valid reason; that is one reason why the human
rights licenses are rejected. Some things are just not appropriate
subject matter for trying to fix in an open source license.
I don't intrinsically disagree with this, but in my head I have various
"canons of construction" related to the OSD, and the specific one here
is that I had always accepted that an OSD-compliant license must act
only through the grant of permissions or conditions on the software
itself (as well as being consistent with other elements of the OSD).
Thus, "Do no evil" or "do not work more than 40 hours in a week" were
appropriately out of scope for an open source license. But in the
specific case of the CAL, I had drawn the data portability aspects
carefully to only include permissions or conditions on the software
itself, thus keeping it in scope for the OSD.
I think it would be useful, both in this case, and generally, to
elaborate on some of these implicit canons of construction. I think it
is valid to say that something is "out of scope," but I would suggest
that this is a good case to use to develop an articulable rule for what
that means.
Similarly, there may be something to the international applicability of
a license that could be fertile ground for a canon of construction.
Thanks,
Van
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