[foundation-board] Openness and licences...

[Ben Laurie]

Bah. I have to confess I had failed to take in the mention of
"share-alike" at the end of that definition.

So, I am going to have to go back to first principles instead of
getting a free ride :-)

I will write something up, but it may be a little while...

On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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