Re: OpenDivX license
On Sun, 21 Jan 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A philosophical point first: I believe that attempting standards enforcement through copyright licensing is fundamentally broken. We've seen this tried several times, with the Artistic (control over "Perl" name), and SCSL licenses, the results tending to be that the license doesn't work as intended or doesn't meet the OSD. Wrong tool for the task. Thoughts on the SISSL? It doesn't make adherence mandatory, but it does say you have to release a reference implementation of your divergence from the standard. I'd argue that tying allowed modification to specific compatibility standards is a violation of: - Condition 3, Derived Works: Is the original license bound to the same terms, or could the authors modify the code to be incompatible with the MPEG-4 standard. This might be a stretch, but I'd argue it hard. The license does *allow* derived work (allow != unconditionally allow), and that derived work, since it's conformant to the standard, can be distributed under the *same* terms. However, the protocol standard effectively enumerates more conditions on that allow, and if any of those conditions are not OSD conformant (my CSS example), the license as a whole is not. - Condition 6, Discrimination against fields of endeavor: This is IMO far more clear cut. Restricting application of the license to code meeting specific compatibility requirements is imposing a restriction that a work *not* adhering to this standard is not permitted. The discrimination is against any field of endeavor which isn't directly focused on MPEG-4. This whole clause is a seriously vague mess, because "field of endeavor" isn't defined anywhere and has no (that I know of) rigorous standard definition in copyright law. By one stretch, the GPL discriminates against a field of endeavor: the commercial-license-driven software market. You may say, "but what if I just want some small bit of the code, like a compression algorithm, to use in a web server? It doesn't even make sense to talk about MPEG-4 in that case." Well, that's a *practical* issue, but many open source licenses have that problem. On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Ben Tilly wrote: What do you think about permitting any change you want, but requiring changes that break a given standard to state that fact whenever and wherever they display notifications that it is derived from __X__ that it does not actually meet standard __Y__? I don't see it as affecting OSD conformance. Personally speaking, I don't think it's strong enough - I prefer the SISSL's requirement of publishing a reference implementation of your changes, so that you can't use that noncompliance to gain market advantage. Brian
Re: Cherry-picking license proposals
Sorry if this seems pedantic... On Sun, 21 Jan 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Convergence. Despite some degree of internal conflict, the final nail was really the result of independent external resolution of many of the issues we had sought to address. As of the last meeting (O'Reilly Conference, July, 2000), the landscape was clearly shifting to focus on what seemed to be three principle licensing models: - GNU GPL/LGPL: A primary license for HP's EZSpeak (?) project, e-speak. Also OpenOffice. adopted as part of multi-licensing models by Sun, Mozilla, and others. - Mozilla Public License: With very minor wording changes, adopted by Sun as the SISSL. Uh, no. Adopted by Sun for the "SPL", under which they've released NetBeans. The SISSL is much different, much shorter, more in spirit with the BSD licenses than the other two. - BSD/MIT style: Apple's Darwin code is derived from BSD sources, and Apple appears more comfortable with the BSD licensing model than GPL. Apple's own licensing has changed within the past month, I still need to review the changes. Yes, but to be clear, Apple's APSL is much different than the BSD license. Brian
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
News flash: A _lot_ of technical people are using Word docs and PowerPoint presentations these days - Linux/VMWare is my weapon of choice, but there are others. Bryan Ben Tilly wrote: Jorg Janke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to raise three issues: a) License issues b) Compiere license b) Open Source Trademark a) General License issues --- - I am a bit frustrated about the process; I had to submit our suggestion three times before receiving the first feedback. It would help if you sent mails as regular ASCII rather than formatted HTML. This is a question of knowing your audience. HTML can be made to look nice, which means that it will go over well with suits. However it suffers from bit-rot, displays differently on different platforms, is more complex for standard text tools to process, etc. Therefore technical types tend to see HTML email in the same category as Word and Powerpoint attachments - a sign that the sender is not technical and does not have a clue about how the technical community works. So say it in ASCII. It may not look as pretty to you, but it will go over a lot better with us. begin:vcard n:George;Bryan tel;fax:703-883-6708 tel;work:703-883-5458 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.mitre.org org:The MITRE Corporation;Signal Processing Center adr:;;1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W622;McLean;VA;22102-3481;USA version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Lead Signal Processing Engineer x-mozilla-cpt:;-9184 fn:Dr. Bryan George end:vcard S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: IPL as a burden
The comment was ironic, to make that self-same point. We can't look at the letter of it, but at the feelings of the community which supports the concept... and the irony is directed at IntraDAT... SamBC - Original Message - From: "Andrew J Bromage" [EMAIL PROTECTED] G'day all. On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 11:34:49AM +, SamBC wrote: The OSD requires that licenses do not discriminate against a group of people - it may be pushing it, but this license discriminates against those unable (or at an even greater push, unwilling) to pay a license fee. That _is_ pushing it. The GPL discriminates against those unable or unwilling to comply with the GPL. Cheers, Andrew Bromage
RE: Cherry-picking license proposals
From: Carter Bullard [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Is the OSI trying to make a determination that two different legal documents are functionally equivalent? [DJW:] As I understand it, they are determining whether the licence is a member of the set of possible "open source" licences. The place to define the liabilities and remedies is in the license. My companies license has some detail in this area. [DJW:] IANAL, but I believe that it can only be done in a contract. Many "licenses" are actually both a licence and a contract, and some of the arguments about shrink wrapped licences are about whether a contract actually exists. In English, law contracts require an offer, acceptance of that offer and a consideration (something given in return). It would probably help if "open source" licenses that attempt to go beyond a statement of permissions explicitly identified all three components. [DJW:] -- --- DISCLAIMER - Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.
Re: Cherry-picking license proposals
Dave, A note of clarification. Although I need not speak for OSI, I am confident that they would say that they are NOT acting as legal counsel for the drafters of the submitted licenses. Instead, the idea of getting a license approved or of discussing the licenses on this list is more about the goals of open source and whether the proposed license terms in the submitted licenses are consistent with those goals. In other words, we are really talking about a matter of organizational politics and pragmatic business practices in my opinion, not legal counsel. Of course, many of the issues we discuss relate to legal questions, but so do front page stories in the morning newspaper. OSI, like other open source groups, wants to encourage software developers to develop and use software under the open source business model. Some of us on this list are lawyers and participate in the license discussions for educational and open discussion purposes. As a law professor and writer on issues of law and technology, I am here to learn and share knowledge. Most people, I think, understand that when it comes to obtaining legal counsel, you must hire a lawyer. -Rod
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Bryan George [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: News flash: A _lot_ of technical people are using Word docs and PowerPoint presentations these days - Linux/VMWare is my weapon of choice, but there are others. News flash: Doing so is still a good way to guarantee that a lot of other technical people will drop your document in the circular bin sight unseen. Who is your audience and what is the document for? Cheers, Ben _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
Re: Cherry-picking license proposals
on Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 12:30:15AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Sorry if this seems pedantic... Not at all, quite appreciated. I have trouble keeping up with everything and appreciate the watchful eye. Thanks. On Sun, 21 Jan 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Convergence. Despite some degree of internal conflict, the final nail was really the result of independent external resolution of many of the issues we had sought to address. As of the last meeting (O'Reilly Conference, July, 2000), the landscape was clearly shifting to focus on what seemed to be three principle licensing models: - GNU GPL/LGPL: A primary license for HP's EZSpeak (?) project, e-speak. Also OpenOffice. adopted as part of multi-licensing models by Sun, Mozilla, and others. - Mozilla Public License: With very minor wording changes, adopted by Sun as the SISSL. Uh, no. Adopted by Sun for the "SPL", under which they've released NetBeans. The SISSL is much different, much shorter, more in spirit with the BSD licenses than the other two. - BSD/MIT style: Apple's Darwin code is derived from BSD sources, and Apple appears more comfortable with the BSD licensing model than GPL. Apple's own licensing has changed within the past month, I still need to review the changes. Yes, but to be clear, Apple's APSL is much different than the BSD license. Brian -- Karsten M. Self [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org PGP signature
Re: trademarked logos and GPL
Hi Larry, Of course we're going to run this by our attorneys but I was trying to see if there's a 'standard' practice for this that the open source community follows (btw, I too have a law degree). Bart "Lawrence E. Rosen" wrote: I want to discourage license-discuss participants from answering questions like this one. Not that its a bad question, or one that would be uninteresting for more than the questioner to hear answered. But non-lawyers have to avoid giving legal advice -- and the questioner would be foolish to accept legal advice from non-lawyers about a technically complicated subject such as trademark law. Even lawyers like me have to be very careful. We are not supposed to give generic legal advice to non-clients over the Internet. That's why I sometimes avoid answering questions on this discussion list, simply because I don't want to be seen as advising someone how to act when I don't know them and don't represent them. I encourage the questioner to direct his question, in private, to an attorney. If you don't know of a good attorney, call me or call other people you know and ask for recommendations. /Larry Rosen Attorney and Executive Director, OSI 650-216-1597 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.opensource.org www.rosenlaw.com -Original Message- From: Bart Decrem [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 5:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: trademarked logos and GPL Hi everyone, I have a feeling that the question I'm about to ask has been asked answered a few times already, so I do apologize for that. We at Eazel are trying to figure out what we need to do so we can distribute our corporate logo along with our Nautilus software, which is GPL'd, without losing our ability to control the use of our trademark. It looks like Red Hat distributes their logo in a separate RPM, which is released under very restrictive licensing terms, and that there are a few GPL'd applications (most prominently Red Hat Update Agent) that have a dependency on that. So we're thinking of doing exactly the same thing. We use the Eazel logo as a 'throbber' (think: the throbbing N in your Netscape browser). The installer for our Nautilus software would always install that logo. But if someone objects to the licensing terms of the logo, they could uninstall our logo RPM, in which case they would see a generic throbber. The CVS version of our source code would only include the generic throbber. Is this the best way to proceed? Bart
Advice on advice (was Re: trademarked logos and GPL)
on Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 05:23:00PM -0800, Lawrence E. Rosen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: -Original Message- From: Bart Decrem [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 5:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: trademarked logos and GPL Hi everyone, I have a feeling that the question I'm about to ask has been asked answered a few times already, so I do apologize for that. We at Eazel are trying to figure out what we need to do so we can distribute our corporate logo along with our Nautilus software, which is GPL'd, without losing our ability to control the use of our trademark. It looks like Red Hat distributes their logo in a separate RPM, which is released under very restrictive licensing terms, and that there are a few GPL'd applications (most prominently Red Hat Update Agent) that have a dependency on that. So we're thinking of doing exactly the same thing. We use the Eazel logo as a 'throbber' (think: the throbbing N in your Netscape browser). The installer for our Nautilus software would always install that logo. But if someone objects to the licensing terms of the logo, they could uninstall our logo RPM, in which case they would see a generic throbber. The CVS version of our source code would only include the generic throbber. Is this the best way to proceed? I want to discourage license-discuss participants from answering questions like this one. Not that its a bad question, or one that would be uninteresting for more than the questioner to hear answered. But non-lawyers have to avoid giving legal advice -- and the questioner would be foolish to accept legal advice from non-lawyers about a technically complicated subject such as trademark law. Even lawyers like me have to be very careful. We are not supposed to give generic legal advice to non-clients over the Internet. That's why I sometimes avoid answering questions on this discussion list, simply because I don't want to be seen as advising someone how to act when I don't know them and don't represent them. I encourage the questioner to direct his question, in private, to an attorney. If you don't know of a good attorney, call me or call other people you know and ask for recommendations. As one of the usual suspects in situations such as this (and mindful that I should avoid giving direct advice), I'll note that my own response tends toward: - My own personal reaction -- does the proposal irk me? - Other examples -- any interesting references I can think of. - Relevant discussion -- FSB just went through a slightly bloody round of "how can I apply trademark within the free software model?", which might be interesting. - Questioning goals: the question is slightly vague, what is the intended use and significance of the mark? ...informing, without serving direct legal guidance. Or so I'd hope. I don't think we need to avoid such questions or discussions. I do believe we should be aware of the limitations upon them. Note that non US nationals might or might not be held to US law regarding disbursment of legal knowledge as well (I don't know what the standard isLarry? g). -- Karsten M. Self [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org PGP signature
RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
Title: RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source Hi Larry, Here some ideas and suggestions: - If someone send s mail to license-approval, just acknowledge the mail, say it might take 6 months and that they should evaluate using the license in the meantime. This sets expectations and buys you time. - If you are swamped with license requests, I think that the only way put is to create a standard license with just replacing the name and a few options to either select or not select (I guess mainly in the area of what to do when re-distributing). I cleaned up our license suggestion and it might be a starting base. The main difference to many other licenses are: commercial use, require 3rd party license. Gone are the restrictions criticized before. Links: http://www.compiere.org/license.html and the as much pure ASCII as a MS Windows system allows version http://www.compiere.org/license.txt . It would actually be nice to make it more readable for non-lawyers, but would need feedback for that. - If you have a standard license, than I would definitely charge for the approval. IBM, Netscape, Apple, Sun, etc. will pay. Use a revenue scaled fee, maybe starting at $1000(Whatever a hired lawyer would charge) - What you want to do (I assume) is help the hacker to have a license to protect him/her - and that should be for free. All the others using Open Source as a publicity or marketing tool should pay by their ability. - This would give you time to help the hacker, concentrate on new areas and make the others pay for what they are looking for. - I subscribed to the license-discuss for a while before sending my last mail ... and I read more or less all licenses published on your site. You are probably aware, that most companies use the open source initiative as a publicity tool hey we are the good guys - same as open system movement a few years back. - Consequently, I really think you guys need to change your emphasis from approving Licenses to coming up with a Good Open Source Seal or something like that. I am in this industry for more than 20 years starting as a hacker to senior management and back to hacker (because management stinks). When I started, I thought that my source is the most valuable I have. I realized, that giving it away does not harm you at all, it gives the recipient just a good feeling. Even if a bad person takes it and does something you would not like, the damage is minimal. - The main difference between commercial software and Open Source is not that you can get the source, but that you can legally use it without paying. How many people are capable changing code of Apache? But on the other hand, how many people use a MS Word license for more than one person/pc - or forgot to count a few users/CPUs/MHz/etc. for their Oracle or other server licenses? - I think that you need to try to protect the (sill good) Open Source name - Or it will simply end up as slapping your source on the web, offer implementation and support (the only way to get it working) and sail under the Open Source the good guy banner. With the ASP model becoming more and more attractive, the support fee just includes the prorated license fee. I just paid my yearly Borland JDeveloper support fee (which is just upgrades) for $2400 - a new license is $2900 - effectively you are paying $500 for the free implementation support after the initial purchase. AGAIN: - Concentrate on the IMPORTANT parts - and License issues are not the most important part for the Open Source movement well ... after approving mine ;-) The license can only be a part. - Suggestion for the Good Open Source Citizen Seal administration process: a) The person(s) interested fill out a form and sign it b) You believe them and they get the seal c) The seal is just a graph linking to a site where you list the nice guys d) On the nice guys page are the criteria listed and a link to a form which can be filled out if someone thinks that they don't follow the principles by letter or spirit e) If you get an email, you ask the seal owner for comment/change and decide f) If required, seal is revoked and the page link put to a bad guys list and I would even volunteer to set up the process and maintain these pages. P.S.: Sorry about sending messages in something other than base ASCII. Cheers, Jorg Janke (203) 445-8182 www.accorto.com Smart Business Management Solutions www.compiere.org Open Source ERP -Original Message- From: Lawrence E. Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 02:13 PM To: Jorg Janke; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source I am answering an email that was posted to license-discuss. It raised several concerns that are widely shared. I am writing both to apologize about the long delay in responding to your (and many other) licenses, and to ask your patience. The board of directors of OSI is a volunteer group. They have limited time
Re: To the keepers of the holy grail of Open Source
On Monday 22 January 2001 09:35 am, Bryan George wrote: Okay, I'm writing it down: "Audience = inflexible Unix bigots = document = brain dead ASCII text". Got it, thanks! Sigh... I don't have MS Office, and I am not about to pay for it. This has nothing to do with bigotry, but everything to do with my money, my harddrive space, etc... And when it comes to a choice between rebooting the system to run your document's native OS, or shelling out yet more money to get VMWare, I'll just abstain. There are alternatives so use them. If the presentation you are sending is comprised solely of verbal content, then ASCII is sufficient. If you need some small amount of text formatting, try HTML. And if you need to control the document's appearance exactly, try PDF. -- David Johnson ___ http://www.usermode.org
Re: The Toll Roads of Open Source
begin Manfred Schmid quotation: We see that emotions have gone high. I see that you _continue_ declining to address the subject at hand. Which is evaluating whether specific licences are OSD-compliant or not. Instead, you digress onto business models, alleged deficiencies in the OSD, and a whole circus of diversions. We take the freedom to make a final statement concerning our requests. [90-line manifesto snipped] Farewell! I sincerely hope that your employer has the good sense to forebear from referring to software under that licence as "open source", or it will have a serious public-relations problem. For it is _very_ obvious that, in fact, you do not intend to produce open-source software, and never did. Good luck to you. -- Cheers, "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us Rick Moenin trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Artemus Ward (1834-67), U.S. journalist
