Quoting John Cowan (co...@mercury.ccil.org): [Appreciating and agreeing with what you say, FWIW, but I have one thing to add.]
> In the end, certification is just a convenience to the users: it says > that a group of fairly knowledgeable people are willing to stand behind > the cliam that each certified license conforms to the OSD. In my opinion, this is a particularly important function because of firms that publish deliberately deceptive licensing, such as sneaking extremely problematic and intrusive badgeware clauses, having the effect of greatly deterring all third-party commercial reuse, into what is publicly claimed to be [A]GPL v3 licensing using the 'legal notices or author attributions' incorporate-by-reference feature in section 7 of [A]GPL v3. SugarCRM, one of the main drivers of the badgeware model - back in the days when OSI was being arm-twisted by that gang of OSBC regulars in the advocacy effort that resulted in certification of dead-on-arrival minimal badgeware licence CPAL - appears to have pioneered this style of Section 7 hokery: The sponsoring firm behind a Web 2.0 hosted application claims in all the public marketing materials that the software is open source under GPLv3 or APGLv3, disclosing _only_ in obscure, not-easily-noticed places that they actually mean GPLv3 or APGLv3 with additional restrictions encumbering commercial third-party reuse. Admittedly, OSI's licence-certification program doesn't do much to stop this sort of chicanery, but at least OSI makes clear that its certificaiton program certifies specific licence texts and not also Everyone's Vaguely Similar Imitation Licences with Concealed Anti-Competition Restrictions. (As an aside, I also think SugarCRM and imitators' use of section 7, when last I checked on that usage[1], vastly exceeded the permitted scope of notice, e.g., the only notices that may be required to be included somewhere in the interactive user interface display are a copyright notice and warranty disclaimer if applicable: That is made clear in the licence text's definition of Appropriate Legal Notices. Requiring a company logo on every single user interace screen of the work and all derivative works exceed greatly what section 7 permits, not to mention requiring UI display of legal notices beyond the copyright notice and warranty disclaimer. This misuse is particularly egregious since the section 7 wording was edited to its present state at the request of SugarCRM, Inc., according to Richard Fontana's post to debian-legal a couple of years ago.[2]) [1] http://linuxgazette.net/159/misc/lg/sugarcrm_and_badgeware_licensing_again.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2011/12/msg00045.html Richard opines in this post that SugarCRM's logo requirement as of mid-2007, in his judgement complied with FSF's intent about how intrusive badgeware might be and still remain free software. I respect Richard highly and of course believe him. By 2009, when I last checked SugarCRM's terms, they were excessive enough that IMO, if FSF still thinks that's not out of bounds for free software, they've lost their collective minds. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
