New terms for ‘Open Source’?
p2pnet.net News:- Ex-Red Hat man Russell Nelson, now the OSI’s (Open Source Initiative) new president, wants three new terms added to the Definition of Open Source.
“The move comes after drawing fire over the growing number of licenses the OSI approves as meeting the definition and a long acknowledged problem of the proliferation of vanity licenses and incomprehensible legal jibberish,” says the OSI on its webpage.
“We have always pushed people in this direction, but by adding these terms to the OSD, we will be proactively refusing licenses which don’t meet these requirements,” says Nelson in an email to the OSI license-discuss mailing list Nelson.
11. The license must not be duplicative
That is, it is up to the submitter to demonstrate that the license solves a problem not sufficiently addressed by an existing certified license. Certification may be denied to any submitted license, even a technically OSD-conformant license, if OSI deems it duplicative.
12. The license must be clearly written, simple, and understandable
Open-source licenses are written to serve people who are not attorneys, and they need to be comprehensible by people who are not attorneys. OSI may deny certification to licenses which, though technically correct and OSD-compliant, are so obscure and complicated that an intelligent layperson cannot be assured of knowing his or her rights and liabilities after reading it. The burden of engineering this clarity falls on the submitter.
13. The license must be reusable
If the license contains proper names of individuals, associations, or projects, these must be incorporated by reference from an attachment that declares the names of the issuer and any other cited parties, and which can be modified without changing the terms of the license. As the sole exception, the license may name its owner and steward.”
The current version of the Open Source Definition doesn’t include terms such as these, “while the license approval process only encourages the use of current licenses by insisting on an explanation of why the new license doesn’t meet someone’s legal need,” says the OSI, adding that they’re still up for discussion.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
===================
See:-
webpage – New OSI President Seeking Proactive License Simplicity, March 2, 2005
March 4th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
“must not be duplicative” !?!?
“must be clearly written, simple, and understandable”!?!?
“must be reusable”!?!?
Who the Sam Hill do these anti-corporate anti-lawyer commie pinko OSI punks think they are????
But seroiusly, GREAT WORK RUSSELL! The business world in general surely would benefit from a dose of common sense like this. Can you imagine how excellent it would be if laws, lawsuits, corporate charters, EULAs, insurance policys, business contracts, etc, etc… were held to such standards? For one thing, 80% of the blood sucking lawyers would be instantly out of a job. And as Martha would say, “That’s a good thing”.