On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 9:15 AM Tzeng, Nigel H. <[email protected]> wrote: > > Let's clarify the history on CC0. > > > > Objection to CC0 was primarily you and Bruce which made it DOA regardless of > the opinions of the rest of the list. There was no "quickly growing > consensus" when they pulled the plug.
You're right, Nigel -- except that I can't see why that would have made it DOA. Apart from that, I withdraw that characterization. I have not reviewed the thread, but I do seem to recall being the person who called attention to the patent language. I remember what bothered me at the time was that if CC0 were summarily approved -- and yes, it seems that that was the direction things were going in -- it would be inconsistent with the hostile reception of the MXM license that Carlo Piana had submitted, which I believe was based on MPL but with a significantly narrowed patent license grant. I was not troubled by the idea of approval of CC0 as such. Back in those days I was a big fan of CC0. I used to recommend its use to Red Hat developers, for certain purposes. I was known for saying "I love CC0" (yes, I used that phrasing) so often that I remember Aaron Williamson joking about this at an OSCON talk. What concerned me, and I remember Carlo noting this as well, was the possibility that OSI, or l-r, would treat similar licenses differently based on varying sentimental attitudes toward the license submitter. Creative Commons, in those days perhaps even more than today, was viewed very positively in the open source community. (I feel that today there is more distance between the CC and open source communities.) The MXM license was associated with MPEG and more generally with the controversial topic of media codec patent licensing. Since you brought up NOSA, my concerns about that license in a sense came out of the earlier MXM/CC0 experience. NASA is another entity that, I had come to perceive, was viewed very positively in the open source community for what seemed to be, at root, sentimental reasons connected to NASA's relationship with tech culture (I was seeing this at the time in the OpenStack project, whose early popularizers made much of its NASA origins). At least from today's perspective, we saw the problem play out a couple of years later with the UPL submission. The hostile initial reaction to UPL, on l-r and elsewhere, was obviously connected to general community hostility towards Oracle, especially during that period. So you've motivated me to say this: I think OSI should dispense with the whole idea that it should passively react to any supposed consensus that emerges from license-review. OSI has a responsibility to determine whether a license meets the OSD and provides software freedom regardless of what direction the l-r discussion is going in. One reason for this is the history of inconsistent attitudes on l-r towards submitted licenses based apparently on views of the license submitter. > What was happening behind the scenes on the OSI board I cannot say but to say > that “the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous > precedent” is a significant overstatement. I agree. > The fact remains that CC0 is a widely used Open Source license approved by > CC, FSF and the USG. OSI approval, or lack thereof, has had minimal impact > on its use. I think things are more complicated than you suggest. The discussion of CC0 (and the inconsistent earlier discussion of MXM) exposed a policy problem surrounding open source and patents that had previously been ignored or misunderstood. Or perhaps it showed the beginnings of an evolution in community understanding of the issue. One of the major open source policy issues of the present day, at least from my standpoint, is the controversy over open source in the FRAND licensing context. A couple of companies have been promoting the view that (a) "copyright only" licenses that explicitly withhold patent licenses can be open source, (b) widely-used permissive open source licenses that do not explicitly mention patents should be interpreted as "copyright only". The OSI has in recent years been fairly clear and activist in its opposition to this campaign. The approval of CC0 would have been inconsistent with the OSI's own emerging view on interpretation of the OSD in relation to this issue. Richard _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
