[foundation-board] Openness and licences...

Tue Jan 3 12:00:22 UTC 2012

It seems the Panton Principles give me an opportunity to summarise my
concerns in a nutshell.

The Panton Principles define "open" as  “A piece of content or data is
open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject
only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, but why "content or data" and
not everything?

Simple: because the "open source" definition is _not_ open by this
standard, since it admits licences that are more restrictive. In
particular, the GPL family of licences. This is obviously a matter of
political expediency, but it seems to me these politics should not
concern us, we should stick to the principles.

So, this is my core concern: if we believe in "open", why are we using
a licence that fails the test?

I would like to separate that question from the question of which
licence we should be using: first we should agree that GPL does not
meet our standards.