Quoting Pamela Chestek (pam...@chesteklegal.com): > In my view, this is a perfectly appropriate place to discuss this > concept. This forum is intended for sharing ideas and getting > feedback on them. That's how new, creative solutions to problems > might get developed. If it's not a topic you're interested in you > can mute the thread.
I respect your views, Ms. Chestek, as you may recall from earlier interactions. Please indulge my elaborating on my own view: There has been a long history of people asking for help from license-discuss in drafting licences to implement poorly considered ideas. Most of those have involved clever and inventive ways to purportedly issue open source but with the right of commercial use subtly or unsubtly impaired, so as to motivate recipients intending commercial use to acquire an alternative proprietary licence. One of many examples would be badgeware licensing. During that episode, I was among the OSI regulars who was willing to help the CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, Ross Mayfield, fine-tune his Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) as a prototype, minimally annoying badgeware licence for OSI Certified approval, which ensued on July 25, 2007. I suspect most of us regret the time and assistance we put into that discussion. What motivated some (speaking for myself, at least) was the strongly implied threat from various of the closely associated Web 2.0 badgeware firms that if CPAL were not approved they would adopt a much worse licence, claim it was open source, and ignore OSI. So, CPAL got the nod after protracted and time-wasting haggling in this space. The crowning irony of that incident was soon to follow: None of the badgeware firms (nor, as far as I can tell, anyone else) actually used CPAL. Substantively all of them followed the lead of badgeware firm SugarCRM (headed by my old boss Larry Augustin of VA Linux Systems) in quietly switching to (alleged) MPL 1.1licensing with a severely commercial-use-impairing 'Exhibit B' addendum[1], or a similar addendum incorporated by reference as an addendum to GPLv3 -- a situation that pertains to this day, last I checked. So, license-discuss and license-review regulars' time was wasted. If I worked at it, I could probably remember at least half a dozen other cases where license-discuss regulars spent time helping a querent draft an intended licence wtih questionable objectives, despite reservations. And my point is, when one has those reservations, it's smarter in the long term to say 'With all due respect, no, we won't help you with that.' I wish we'd said that to Ross Mayfield. It would have saved a lot of time and trouble. It's just my opinion, of course, but IMO, the regulars' feedback to Eric Schultz has already been damning enough to warrant 'With all due respect, no, we won't help you with that.' But there is also another particular that might be worth mentioning. I hinted at it rather than spelling it out in my earlier posting, but now I'll be more direct: I had called people's attention to Mr. Schultz's latest (December) blog posting (https://wwahammy.com/on-safety-at-libreplanet/) concerning his LibrePlanet effort, for a particular reason. In his posting here, Mr. Schultz starts out with his basic idea to 'discourage and shame morally corrupt users' and then introduces what he says is the first of two implementation notions, that of declaring despised users personae non grata in the licence preamble. And his two canonical examples struck me as having a by-the-numbers air about their selection: Amazon/ICE and BP (ex-British Petroleum). Mind you, I assume those are real examples provided in good faith, but couldn't help suspecting an cited and rather stronger motivator. So, looking at Mr. Schultz's blog, one immediately finds his most-recent, long, quite impassioned December blog post 'Is LibrePlanet Safe?' (https://wwahammy.com/on-safety-at-libreplanet/). In it, he expresses alarm that LibrePlanet events have not yet been rendered 'safe and inclusive' by ensuring an official means to sanction Richard M. Stallman. I am making no comment about his reasons, which may have been compelling, but it is past dispute that Mr. Schultz and his LibrePlanet co-signers have a grudge specifically against Mr. Stallman, and it seems very odd for him to have reached for somewhat anodyne faceless corporations as examples of candidate personae non grata when a more specific and emotive example was already much on his mind. Perhaps this is coincidental, and yet another Stallman pile-on is not the unmentioned agenda, here, but at minimum, this gives an advance picture of what Mr. Schultz's Persona Non Grata Prelude would probably tend over time to consist of: an ever-growing litany of named and would-be shamed persons against whom a developer once, years ago, had a peeve against. Mr. Stallman would, I suggest, probably be the first, and the squalid parade would continue from there. And it is my twice-considered view that this is a quite bad idea, with which we regulars should not encourage or assist. Just as we should have spotted the Ross Mayfield bait and switch and not wasted our time back in 2007, and just as we collectively said 'No, open source licensing is not a suitable vehicle for attacking apartheid.' I suspect Mr. Schultz's idea #2 of 2 will be in basically the same spirit as #1 of 2, and likewise merit non-assistance, but I'll gladly suspend judgement until he articulates it. [1] If interested in this history, see my coverage for _Linux Gazette_: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/exhibit-b.html http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/exhibit-b-more.html -- Cheers, "Maybe the law ain't perfect, but it's the only Rick Moen one we got, and without it we got nuthin'." r...@linuxmafia.com -- U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, circa 1875 McQ! (4x80) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
