[foundation-board] Openness and licences...

[Ben Laurie]

No other opinions?

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
> 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.