On Wednesday 08 September 2010 11:46:50 Praveen A wrote: > 2010/9/8 jtd <[email protected]>: > > The OSI has repeatedly shot itself in the foot with approvals for > > all sorts of jailed licences. eg. the Sun Solaris licence. > > I don't think OSI approved Sun Solaris license. What it approved is > CDDL, which is also approved by FSF.
Afair OSI had initial approved or was strongly considering approval of the Sun Solaris licence back in 2003-4 (i might be recollecting wrongly though). CDDL is not gpl compatible. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses > There is only one license > which is approved by OSI but which is considered non-free by FSF. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License > > However FOSSCOM should not in principle have a problem with any > > licence which is GPL compatible. > > Why restrict it to only GPL compatible licenses? We should be ok > with any licenses that OSI, FSF and Debian considers Free Software. No we should not. Especially with licences that permit binary only distributions. BSDish licences are gpl compatible but suffer from this very very bad hole. In the time frames that control the tech industry life cycles, it is very definetly a problem. In the case of egovernance, it is the taxpayer who is footing the bill. There are innumerable instances where government funded data and technologies are being sold to private enterprise. In some cases it is disguised as consultancy (CSIR). In others a less detailed subset is made public (ISRO). We dont want similiar subterfuges, especially considering that nothing prevents use of gpl software commercially. > > Having said that, one may do well to note that BSDlike licences > > tend to be grossly misused by the usual suspects, resulting in > > enormous problems for all FOSS users. Incase of egovernance (or > > even other non trivial) software this should be strictly avoided. > > We can certainly say we prefer GPL. Without sound logic behind releasing tax payer funded software under non gpl but gpl compatible licences, we should be insisting on the GPL. One would like to maintain a healthy environment for the future. One possible exception would be a closed software vendor releasing his source used in an egovernance project, subsequent to a new FOSS mandatory policy. -- Rgds JTD _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
