Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. scripsit: > My thoughts on this are twofold: [1] that OSD 5 or the proposed OSD 6 should > be explicitly limited to matters that generally are NOT already covered by > laws;
The laws of which jurisdiction? > in other words, the OSD should restrict the term "discrimination" to > apply to matters that are important to the goals of the open source > community (see below) Let us not forget the original use case for OSD #5, the license that prohibits "use of this software by the police of South Africa". No reasonable court is going to say that being a South African policeman is a suspect classification meriting strict scrutiny (or whatever its native equivalent of that may be), but that license is not Open Source nevertheless. Whenever I need to reduce the OSD to bullet-points, it winds up something like this: - Freely redistributable - Source code available - Modifications allowed - No discrimination IOW, I consider the anti-discrimination requirement an essential part of what makes Open Source "open". > Regarding my first thought, if we accept the argument that the OSD should > *generally* reflect the values of "freedom of contract," I can't agree with you less. Freedom of contract implies the freedom not to contract. Open Source licensors give up that freedom by issuing public licenses that apply to all and give the same rights to all (with the obvious exception of the licensor, in cases like the NPL). To my mind, the trick is how to allow patent poison pills to work while blocking the argument that they discriminate against the class of people who sue the licensor for patent infringement. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.reutershealth.com http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Humpty Dump Dublin squeaks through his norse Humpty Dump Dublin hath a horrible vorse But for all his kinks English / And his irismanx brogues Humpty Dump Dublin's grandada of all rogues. --Cousin James -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
