in reply to Licensing Revisited ... again and again.

This OSD thing is so terse and incomplete that it has lost my support, at least at the present;
I find this interesting. Does that mean you won't use software that has an OSD license? Or does that mean you won't put an OSD license on software you write? The latter would surprise me, as you also write:
and release all the software I author for my own use / pleasure under either it specifically, the LGPL, or the "Terms of Perl", which we must all be familiar with (which according to user choice may be exactly identical to the GPL, or may be different but still compatible with it -- the "Artistic License").
If there's one license that doesn't close all holes, and that's vague (and even on purpose!), it's the Artistic License. And even the construct "releasing under the terms of Perl" itself is vague and of a dubious nature.

Abigail, preferring a BSD, MIT, X or TeX style license.

  • Comment on Re: Licensing Revisited ... again and again.

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Re: Re: Licensing Revisited ... again and again.
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Feb 18, 2004 at 10:41 UTC

    I havn't yet replied to the root node, as it's long and demands a fairly long reply, at least from me. This one, however, I can give a fairly short response to.

    Most of the licenses mentioned in this post are not only OSD-Open, but have even been certified by the Open Source Inititive as being OSD-Open. The two exceptions I see are TeX and BSD. I'm not sure if you're refering to the "old BSD" or "new BSD" licenses, and I'm not sure if the entry on their list of approved licenses refers to the old or new BSD license either. TeX is not listed, but since it's distributed by Debian in the main section, they consider it to be Free according to the Debian Free Software Guide, which is almost identical. (The OSD started as a copy of the DFSG, and has /mostly/ had minor wording changes since then -- with the exception of clause 10, "No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.")

    Oh, also, /under the same terms as perl (itself)?/i is not a listed license, but since both the Artistic License and the GPL are listed, there is no doubt in my mind that "under the same terms as perl" qualifies as OSD-Open. (Note that it would only take one of the two being OSD-Open to make the statement as a whole OSD-Open.)

    I won't respond to your musings about what it means to loose his support of the OSD, because I'll do that in response to the main post.

    All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

[reply]
      I'm not sure if you're refering to the "old BSD" or "new BSD" licenses, and I'm not sure if the entry on their list of approved licenses refers to the old or new BSD license either.

      As far as I know, everyone's talking about the "new" BSD license. In 1999, U of C retroactively expanded the license terms on all of the existing software that was distributed under the old license to fit the terms of the new one, which is OSI Certified.

[reply]
        Just to clarify, this only applied to BSD Unix software distributed under that license. Any other software using a BSD-style license not distributed by the university obviously isn't affected.
[reply]
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