[foundation-board] Openness and licences...

Fri Jan 13 17:17:34 UTC 2012

Hi

I generally agree that we should be using licenses which comply with
our standards.

As this conversation progresses, most of my concerns will be about how
changing the licenses we use might disrupt the community, affect our
strategy, or divert resources from other obligations.

Cheers

Becky

On 9 January 2012 10:54, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
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