[foundation-board] Openness and licences...

Sun Jan 15 11:11:38 UTC 2012

On 3 January 2012 12:00, 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.”.

Panton Principles aren't really the relevant thing here as they are
just quoting the Open Definition:

http://opendefinition.org/

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

See http://opendefinition.org/okd/ which states at the start:

"Software is excluded despite its obvious centrality because it is
already adequately addressed by previous work."

> 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.

Could you explain why you see GPL as non-compliant (if it were taken
to include software) with the Open Definition. The Open Definition is
directly based on the OSD and hence if the GPL were OSD compliant it
should be OD compliant (and hence compliant with the OD sections of
the Panton Principles -- I note the principles go on to make a
stronger requirement than OD-compliance in its last section).

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

Because we define open for software as the OSD :-)

> 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.

Can you give a brief precis (or link to such a precis by others) of
why the GPL is a) not open b) or if open still unsatisfactory, or not
recommended (I also presume these comments would apply to the AGPL
which is what we use most along with the MIT/BSD). If this is already
in a previous thread I apologize (I believe I have read all your
previous emails but if I have missed one where you already do this
please do point me to it).

Rufus