Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Rick Moen 
Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lro...@rosenlaw.com):

> That said, I remain concerned about our antique mailing list procedures that 
> impose tricky processing exceptions merely to defeat spam. 

With great respect:  It's not that.

The GNU Mailman default setting of 10 maximum To: and Cc: recipients for a 
posting to propagate through without being queued for manual approval
is, in my experience, about right, even though the de-facto limit with
that default setting appears to be 1 or 2 fewer (probably a fencepost
error in the code).  Mail with a higher number of To: and Cc: recipients 
has a very high correlation with spamicity and with posting misbehaviour 
such as attempts to foment cross-mailing-list flamewars.

The listadmins could, if they wish, (say) double that default number,
raising the limit to 20.  I'm betting that a significantly higher amount
of problematic traffic would get through over time (albeit I could be
wrong).

But, additionally, as a reminder, what Simon actually suggested was that
people avoid _cross-posting_.  I concur that this is a good suggestion for 
numerous reasons, including it making a lot more work for the listadmins
of each included forum (given limited overlap of the subscriber bases).
A better practice, if you wish to have a similar discussion on multiple
mailing lists, is to post to each one separately.  Yes, that's not the
least-effort course of action.  You'll probably have noticed that The
Right Thing seldom is.  ;->

> I am frustrated that my "reply-all" can cause a multi-day delay in the
> dissemination of my "deep wisdom" or delay the "deep wisdom" of my
> colleagues here. 

IIRC, the problem wasn't reply-all as such (which is A Good Thing), but
rather inclusion of a rather large number of To: and Cc: recipients in
part because of cross-posting across multiple mailing lists.  Which gets
us back to Simon's point.

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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread John Cowan 
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 3:59 PM, Rick Moen  wrote:

The author in your hypothetical is not actually violating his/her own
> licence, because he/she already had statutory rights to the work's
> copyright-covered rights, and didn't need a licence to get them.
>

Indeed; I should have put "violate" in scare quotes.  This is no
hypothetical, though; it is the term rewriting language Pure <
https://agraef.github.io/pure-lang>, which I recommend to anyone interested
in dynamically typed languages that use pattern matching (and lack
constructor discipline a la Haskell).

-- 
John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.  --Gerald Holton
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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Lawrence Rosen 
Yes, Simon and Rick, I'm sorry I misunderstood Simon's use of the term 
"moderated." As a moderator of another opensource.org list, I can assure you I 
wasn't being disrespectful of moderators.

That said, I remain concerned about our antique mailing list procedures that 
impose tricky processing exceptions merely to defeat spam. I am frustrated that 
my "reply-all" can cause a multi-day delay in the dissemination of my "deep 
wisdom" or delay the "deep wisdom" of my colleagues here. That is technology 
defeating communication. There is better open source technology for discussion 
lists!

/Larry


-Original Message-
From: License-discuss [mailto:license-discuss-boun...@opensource.org] On Behalf 
Of Rick Moen
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2017 1:03 PM
To: license-discuss@opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

Quoting Simon Phipps (webm...@opensource.org):

> I now regret expending volunteer effort trying to help Mr Rosen & 
> others avoid delays getting their deep wisdom disseminated.

I hope and expect that Mr Rosen merely misunderstood, and that he joins me in 
deeply appreciating your efforts.  (My apologies for mistyping your surname, by 
the way.)

(Yes, BTW, I am a fellow listadmin.  ;->  )

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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Rick Moen 
Quoting Simon Phipps (webm...@opensource.org):

> I now regret expending volunteer effort trying to help Mr Rosen & others
> avoid delays getting their deep wisdom disseminated.

I hope and expect that Mr Rosen merely misunderstood, and that he
joins me in deeply appreciating your efforts.  (My apologies for
mistyping your surname, by the way.)

(Yes, BTW, I am a fellow listadmin.  ;->  )

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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread Rick Moen 
Quoting John Cowan (co...@ccil.org):

> I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does
> most of the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small
> interactive main program which provides the command line.  This main
> program is provided in two versions.  One works with GNU readline and is
> GPLed; the other does not provide line editing and is under the same
> permissive license as the library.  The author can do this because he is
> free to violate his own license to create the readline-free version of the
> code, but users would not be.

Will you forgive a quibble, John?  I don't mean to distract from your
overall point, which is well-taken.

The author in your hypothetical is not actually violating his/her own
licence, because he/she already had statutory rights to the work's
copyright-covered rights, and didn't need a licence to get them.  I'm
mentioning this because some people seem to think licence conditions
flow up the licensor's arm and attach to his/her brain, when in fact
they're just a property he/she can attach to a specific codebase
instance, which explains how different instances can exist with
differing licence regimes.

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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Simon Phipps 
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Rick Moen  wrote:

> Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lro...@rosenlaw.com)i, who I think was
> addressing this question to Simon Phipps:
>
> > I dislike mailman defaults. Why are you moderating my emails at all?
> > Or John Cowan's? Or Henrik Ingo's?
>
> I think there's some confusion here caused by inexact wording and the
> word 'moderated' having overloaded meanings:
>

I now regret expending volunteer effort trying to help Mr Rosen & others
avoid delays getting their deep wisdom disseminated.


> Simon Philpps (part of a group of OSI listadmins) mentioned having to
> appprove several recent postings from the listadmin queue that were held
> because of 'too many recipients'.  The Mailman default setting for this
> item ('Ceiling on acceptable number of recipients for a posting', on
> page Privacy Options, Recipient Filters) is 10, though in practice the
> filter seems to trigger on a slightly lower number of recipients.
>
> I infer that Simon, when he spoke of having to 'moderate through'
> postings, meant merely ones that landed in the listadmin queue.  He was
> quite correctly and very benignly giving people advice on how to avoid
> the admin queue.
>
> license-discuss appears to not set any subscriber's 'moderated' flag by
> default -- which again is GNU Mailman's default configuration.  So, I
> strongly suspect that you (Lawrence), and John, and Henrik, do _not_
> have that flag set.  (IMO:) Smart list administration, like smart system
> administration, aspires to automate, to limit manual exception-handling to
> a bare minimum.
>

Exactly, thanks for the explanation.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Rick Moen 
Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lro...@rosenlaw.com)i, who I think was
addressing this question to Simon Phipps:

> I dislike mailman defaults. Why are you moderating my emails at all?
> Or John Cowan's? Or Henrik Ingo's? 

I think there's some confusion here caused by inexact wording and the
word 'moderated' having overloaded meanings:

Simon Philpps (part of a group of OSI listadmins) mentioned having to
appprove several recent postings from the listadmin queue that were held
because of 'too many recipients'.  The Mailman default setting for this
item ('Ceiling on acceptable number of recipients for a posting', on
page Privacy Options, Recipient Filters) is 10, though in practice the
filter seems to trigger on a slightly lower number of recipients.

I infer that Simon, when he spoke of having to 'moderate through'
postings, meant merely ones that landed in the listadmin queue.  He was
quite correctly and very benignly giving people advice on how to avoid
the admin queue.

license-discuss appears to not set any subscriber's 'moderated' flag by
default -- which again is GNU Mailman's default configuration.  So, I
strongly suspect that you (Lawrence), and John, and Henrik, do _not_ 
have that flag set.  (IMO:) Smart list administration, like smart system
administration, aspires to automate, to limit manual exception-handling to
a bare minimum.



> I also moderate an opensource.org mailing list. What a drag to discard
> or ignore spam every day!

The only effective way to reduce that, IMO, is to improve automated
spam-rejection at the receiving MTA, which is a hard problem.  Short of
that, set a short retention period (I like 3 days) on 'Discard held
messages older than this number of days', which is at the bottom of the
General Options page -- where GNU Mailman's default is zero (no
automatic discarding).  A short retention period makes spam expire out
of queue rapidly without listadmin work.  Three-day retention gives
listadmins enough time to notice held non-spam over a holiday weekend.
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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Lawrence Rosen 
Johnny Solbu wrote:
> I moderate many mailman lists (using listadmin), and my experience is that 
> the happens because some people uses «Reply to all» when responding.

I did a "reply-all" in this thread on purpose, because I had reason to believe 
that at least some of the people CC'd and interested in the thread were not 
subscribed to license-discuss@.

I dislike mailman defaults. Why are you moderating my emails at all? Or John 
Cowan's? Or Henrik Ingo's? 

I also moderate an opensource.org mailing list. What a drag to discard or 
ignore spam every day! But we try to set our list defaults so that we don't 
have to moderate each other even if we intentionally CC third parties. There is 
nothing secret or frightening on our public list.

/Larry

-Original Message-
From: License-discuss [mailto:license-discuss-boun...@opensource.org] On Behalf 
Of Johnny A. Solbu
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2017 10:20 AM
To: license-discuss@opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

On Wednesday 21. June 2017 19.04, Simon Phipps wrote:
> I just moderated through a set of messages that were all held by an 
> anti-spam rule because they had too many recipients in To/Cc. Please 
> avoid cross-posting to avoid this.

I moderate many mailman lists (using listadmin), and my experience is that the 
happens because some people uses «Reply to all» when responding.

--
Johnny A. Solbu
web site,   http://www.solbu.net
PGP key ID: 0x4F5AD64DFA687324

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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Rick Moen 
Quoting Johnny A. Solbu (joh...@solbu.net):

> I moderate many mailman lists (using listadmin), and my experience is
> that the happens because some people uses «Reply to all» when
> responding.

FWIW, if more MUAs (mail user agents) were updated to become compliant
with RFC 2369 section 3.4 (as is my mailer, mutt, also Thunderbird,
KMail, many others), and thus heed the List-Post header, that would no
longer happen.  I refer to this SMTP header in every post:

List-Post: 

Gradually, news of this two-decade old Internet standard is making its
way out to mailer authors.  Perhaps via Pony Express.  ;->

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6378773/correct-email-headers-for-delivering-mailing-list-mail

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Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Johnny A. Solbu 
On Wednesday 21. June 2017 19.04, Simon Phipps wrote:
> I just moderated through a set of messages that were all held by an
> anti-spam rule because they had too many recipients in To/Cc. Please avoid
> cross-posting to avoid this.

I moderate many mailman lists (using listadmin), and my experience is that the 
happens because some people uses «Reply to all» when responding.

-- 
Johnny A. Solbu
web site,   http://www.solbu.net
PGP key ID: 0x4F5AD64DFA687324


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[License-discuss] Moderator Advice

2017-06-21 Thread Simon Phipps 
I just moderated through a set of messages that were all held by an
anti-spam rule because they had too many recipients in To/Cc. Please avoid
cross-posting to avoid this.

Thanks,

Simon
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread Joe Kiniry 
Thank you for including me in these discussions.  I'm now subscribed to
license-discuss.

In short, the reason we have made our software available in the fashion
that we have is exactly because of the fear factor surrounding GPL and,
secondarily, we do not want competitors to sell our software without
contributing back to the community.

We have yet to interact with a single elections official who understands
and is comfortable with GPL, let alone demands GPL.  The most common
licenses mentioned by EOs is BSD and Apache.  Zero election officials have
expressed an interest in the OSET public license to date.

As with all R we do at Free & Fair and Galois, we listen to our customers
and do what they ask.  Thus, we release most everything we do under BSD,
unless we are forced towards another OSI license due to build dependencies
etc.

Joe

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 11:58 AM, John Cowan  wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Lawrence Rosen 
> wrote:
>
> > So, I still don't understand what role "principle" plays in BSD and
> > GPL dual licensing?
>
> The principle in question should be a legal maxim but isn't.  "Damnunt
> quod non intelligunt", people fear what they do not understand.
>
> --
> John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
> Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
> that optimum or inadequate performance in the trend of competitive
> activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
> but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be
> taken into account. --Ecclesiastes 9:11, Orwell/Brown version
>
>
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread John Cowan 
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Lawrence Rosen  wrote:

> So, I still don't understand what role "principle" plays in BSD and
> GPL dual licensing?

The principle in question should be a legal maxim but isn't.  "Damnunt quod
non intelligunt", people fear what they do not understand.

-- 
John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that optimum or inadequate performance in the trend of competitive
activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be
taken into account. --Ecclesiastes 9:11, Orwell/Brown version
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread Lawrence Rosen 
John Cowan wrote:

> (Nowadays this wouldn't be necessary, as there are drop-in replacements for 
> readline, but the principle is still the same.)

 

All copyrighted software can have "drop-in replacements" if someone wants to 
build them. Only patents may prevent that, but that's not the topic here. 

 

This drop-in alternative is valid even for the open source election software 
that Brent Turner is concerned about. If someone releases such software under a 
more restrictive license (such as the FreeAndFair or the OSET licenses), 
copyright law allows a BSD or GPL alternative to be dropped in (with 
engineering effort!) to replace it.

 

That's the value of all open source copyright licenses. 

 

So, I still don't understand what role "principle" plays in BSD and GPL dual 
licensing?

 

/Larry

 

 

From: John Cowan [mailto:co...@ccil.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2017 11:17 AM
To: Brent Turner 
Cc: Lawrence Rosen ; license-discuss@opensource.org; Alan 
Dechert ; Joe Kiniry 
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

 

 

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Brent Turner  > wrote:

 

John.  Can you explain why a group such as Oset or FFE would not want to simply 
use GPL ?

 

I don't know those organizations.  But if you issue software under the GPL, you 
reduce your market share by people who want to modify it and won't or can't 
accept the GPL terms, or who just want to use it and are irrationally afraid of 
or hostile to the GPL.  Likewise, if you issue software on BSD terms, you 
reduce your market share by people who are irrationally hostile to BSD 
software, or fear that if a proprietary fork is made it will somehow affect 
their BSD rights or cut them off from their only available source of 
improvements.  If you do both, you have some hope of retaining these people who 
would otherwise be lost.

 

I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does most of 
the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small interactive main 
program which provides the command line.  This main program is provided in two 
versions.  One works with GNU readline and is GPLed; the other does not provide 
line editing and is under the same permissive license as the library.  The 
author can do this because he is free to violate his own license to create the 
readline-free version of the code, but users would not be.

 

(Nowadays this wouldn't be necessary, as there are drop-in replacements for 
readline, but the principle is still the same.)

 

-- 

John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org 
 

Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.

--Nicholas van Rijn

 

 

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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread John Cowan 
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Brent Turner 
wrote:

I assume this is not relevant as I am only interested in public elections -
> which is where the corps I mentioned dwell--  and there would be no reason
> for government to be hostile to GPL .so under that reasoning again I can
> not figure out why they would be opting for license other than GPL
>

I can only speculate.  But looked at with a lawyerly eye that isn't used to
the wonderful world of free software licensing, the GPL looks *weird*.
Where's the consideration?  Where are the restrictive terms?  WHAT DO THEY
WANT?

Gummint lawyers can be just as fearful of what they don't understand as any
other lawyers.  Indeed, their clients probably have more to lose.

-- 
John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
In my last lifetime, I believed in reincarnation;
in this lifetime, I don't.  --Thiagi
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread John Cowan 
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Brent Turner 
wrote:

John.  Can you explain why a group such as Oset or FFE would not want to
> simply use GPL ?


I don't know those organizations.  But if you issue software under the GPL,
you reduce your market share by people who want to modify it and won't or
can't accept the GPL terms, or who just want to use it and are irrationally
afraid of or hostile to the GPL.  Likewise, if you issue software on BSD
terms, you reduce your market share by people who are irrationally hostile
to BSD software, or fear that if a proprietary fork is made it will somehow
affect their BSD rights or cut them off from their only available source of
improvements.  If you do both, you have some hope of retaining these people
who would otherwise be lost.

I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does
most of the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small
interactive main program which provides the command line.  This main
program is provided in two versions.  One works with GNU readline and is
GPLed; the other does not provide line editing and is under the same
permissive license as the library.  The author can do this because he is
free to violate his own license to create the readline-free version of the
code, but users would not be.

(Nowadays this wouldn't be necessary, as there are drop-in replacements for
readline, but the principle is still the same.)

-- 
John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
--Nicholas van Rijn
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread John Cowan 
On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Lawrence Rosen  wrote:

I am surprised by offers at GitHub and elsewhere of open source software to
> the public under "either the BSD or the GPL". Take the BSD! It is fully
> compatible with the GPL anyway. Always take the more generous offer of
> software!


I'm not sure if you meant this to go to the public license-discuss list.

Some people are ideologues who refuse to have anything to do with software
under one or another license.  Offering multiple licenses is a strategy
(misguided, in my opinion) to satisfy (some) such ideologues without
alienating others.

-- 
John Cowan  http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowanco...@ccil.org
Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
--E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale
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Re: [License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

2017-06-21 Thread Henrik Ingo 
I have seen github repositories with MIT or GPL dual licensing
(essentially same as what you say). The explanation was that they
wanted to use MIT (as is common in Node/JavaScript circles) but also
wanted to be GPL compatible, so had added that as an explicit option.
(The particular project then dropped the GPL license, after assurances
that MIT is considered to be GPL compatible.)

henrik

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 1:45 AM, Lawrence Rosen  wrote:
> Thanks for your comments, Joe. Please let me know how OSI responds to your
> license questions.
>
>
>
> I'd like to make one other comment on dual licensing. I support that as a
> commercial business strategy. But the only practical dual licensing
> strategies for a licensor that makes sense to me are choices between the GPL
> or AGPL and a complex (and perhaps more profitable) commercial license. Your
> "FreeAndFair" choice between the GPL and the BSD – assuming it is a fair
> dual licensing choice and not, as in your license, a discriminatory
> provision between categories of users – presents an obvious choice for a
> licensee to make: The BSD is always a better license than the GPL.
>
>
>
> I am surprised by offers at GitHub and elsewhere of open source software to
> the public under "either the BSD or the GPL". Take the BSD! It is fully
> compatible with the GPL anyway. Always take the more generous offer of
> software!
>
>
>
> I'm also copying some friends at OSI, but I'm not copying your email.
>
>
>
> /Larry
>
>
>
> Lawrence Rosen
>
> Rosenlaw (www.rosenlaw.com)
>
> 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
>
> Cell: 707-478-8932
>
>
>
> From: Joe Kiniry [mailto:kin...@freeandfair.us]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 6, 2017 10:55 AM
> To: lro...@rosenlaw.com
> Cc: Brent Turner ; Alan Dechert 
> Subject: Re: FreeAndFair license
>
> 
>
>
>
>
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-- 
henrik.i...@avoinelama.fi
+358-40-5697354skype: henrik.ingoirc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7
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