On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Zluty Sysel <zluty.sy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Could you however elaborate on why the additional restriction would > not be OSD-compliant? Do you think it could be reworded so that it > does become compliant?
The Open Source Definition by Open Source Initiative (as well as The Free Software Definition by FSF) seems pretty clear about restricting the distribution of software. There are some difficult edge cases and sometimes the issue whether a license meets the open source definition is hard to know at a first glance, but restricting the distribution of the software in any way is pretty much a non starter. Your issue is pretty simple, really. If you insist on including the private keys in your software (which is the only reason why the software license should even mention them at all) then (ignoring some quite obvious security implications) however you reword it you won't have a license that meets the definition of open source (or free software) and there seems no way around. But even if you could somehow reword it in such a way that would make it technically meet the definition, then the question is, how could I know if I can redistribute a software that I get from someone if it has a restriction that it cannot include one of your keys, and I can't know whether it does unless I know your keys. Who knows, maybe one one day you create a key that is a string "open source" and suddenly the software stops being open source, just because it happens to contain that string somewhere in the README (and your license doesn't specify where it cannot contain the keys). If, on the other hand, you don't include the private keys in your software then what is the point of restricting their distribution in a license of software that doesn't even include them at all. Would you add to the license of a music player a special clause restricting its distribution if someone happens to add some copyrighted music into its source tree or would you rather make it part of the licence of that music instead? In any case, if you want your software to be considered open source then you should make sure that your license, whatever you finally choose or create, meets the Open Source Definition (and the same goes for free software and The Free Software Definition), and that it is also included in the appropriate lists of licenses kept by the Open Source Initiative and the FSF, as many people look for licenses there to make sure they are open source/free software licences. You can submit your license to the Open Source Licence Review Process here and it is pretty well explained on how to do it correctly: http://opensource.org/approval Of course the easiest way to make sure that your software is recognized as being open source would be to use some of the well established licenses instead of creating yet another one but of course everyone can write a new licence, however problematic that might be in practice. Some useful resources: The Free Software Definition by Free Software Foundation: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The Open Source Definition by Open Source Initiative: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated Report of License Proliferation Committee: http://opensource.org/proliferation-report The Debian Free Software Guidelines: https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines Best regards, Rafał Pocztarski. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss