In analyzing licenses for the LIDESC project http://www.mibsoftware.com/librock/lidesc/index.htm
there are a few types of clauses which in my mind do not meet the spirit of the OSD, but are not clearly rejected by it. Some of these came up by looking at which licenses pass the OSD, but are rejected by the FSF. (A pretty interesting point of study.) I know there is a move to tighten up the OSD. Here are some cases that might be discussed further. 1. Usage restrictions. The OSD relies on the guarantee of the right to run the software made by 17 USC for an owner of a copy. But if someone is not an owner of a copy, and just a license holder, or not under 17 USC, the OSD provides no help. The open source shareware licenses I proposed illustrate this. But there are other usage restrictions which have come up. For example: ``Disclosure of test results, except for the purposes of reporting a suspected problem in the execution of the tests, or claims of "passing the tests" are not permitted without the previous written consent of X/Open (The Open Group).'' 2. OSD says may not discriminate. But GPL 3c makes a distinction between commercial and non-commercial permissions. Under what interpretation of the OSD is that allowed? This impacts the wording LIDESC uses for the symbolic tag librock_USE_C_DISCRIM. 3. In Bruce's APSL 1.0 commentary, http://perens.com/Articles/APSL.html he says that APSL 1.0 is rejectable for a number of reasons which aren't clearly against the OSD in my mind, but certainly they are against the spirit. I reference the LIDESC symbolic tags below. For a discussion, read the APSL.html commentary. RIGHTS_TEMP: For those who do nothing to breach the license, are distribution, use, or other rights revocable, or temporary. (For example: time-limited or based on continued existence or non-existence of approval, relationship, law, entity, intellectual property litigation brought by others, etc.) 3NOTE*: Notification of a specific party is is required. 3MSRC*: Giving modified sources to a specific party is required. If someone could document where they are against the OSD, then I will add the OSD section numbers to the report when such licenses are reported in conflict. If they aren't covered by the present wording of the OSD, maybe they should be in a future version. 4. OSD #8 rejects tieing a license to a specific product. But what about the case where a license says something may NOT be used (or distributed) with a specific product? Over the years I have read licenses which had some of the above. But I did not collect them as examples. I am hoping such licenses will be contributed to the project as examples. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3