on Tue, Feb 19, 2002, Matthew C. Weigel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Tuesday, February 19, 2002, at 08:29 p, Topper, Anthony wrote: > > >We understand the desire to have one "Common Public License" with > >no messy > >variations. We think it is an excellent license, hence our desire > >for our own small variation of it. The issue that had our > >attorney's concerned was IBM as the sole steward of change and NY > >as the applicable law. > > Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems like the OSI should encourage or > require licenses that have such specific language to be submitted > in template form, or to at the least 'approve' the template - and > require that derivatives of the template, modified as templates are > intended to be modified, not be restricted. > > Otherwise, there is the 'one license per package' problem that the > OSD already attempts to prevent.
I've certainly encouraged "templatized" licenses over the past several years. There are several licenses which seem to be well suited to this model, including SD/MIT, NPL, and the revised, generic, IBM PSL. The OSI's purview is approving licenses which conform to the OSD. As such, encouraging or requiring specific forms of licenses may not fall neatly into its lap. But providing a guideline (template template?) for templateizing a license might itself go a long ways toward this goal. Again, I've suggested that a "reference + implementation" model of licenses might work. The reference is the standard, jointly held version of a license. One of the major concerns in licensing is ceding revision authority to another entity. To get around this, implementations of a reference license would reserve this right for the specific party issueing the license. Future revisions would, ideally, be worked out among the parties using implementations of the reference license. A revised reference would be issued, and each party, acting on its own revision clause, could issue an updated implementation of the reference license. This would allow for the option of forking licensing terms (if this was felt necessary), preserving the right to independent evision, while at the same time creating a standard licenseing base from which to work. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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