[od-discuss] no endorsement clauses and OKD conformance (was Re: Up and Coming: Open Government Licence in Canada (OGL-C))

Sun Dec 16 07:34:39 UTC 2012

Another data point of sorts --
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause includes

    "Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
this software without specific prior written permission."

This is a bread-and-butter open source license; nobody thinks it is
non-open. But I gather that people who know and care (uncertain
proportion) prefer the version without that clause. Lots of other open
source licenses have similar, try
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Aopensource.org%2Flicenses%2F%20endorse
... but again, none exactly best practice licenses, and note that
Apache 1.1 had one, Apache 2.0 does not.

Also, the OSD, from which the OKD is derived, has commentary in
http://opensource.org/osd-annotated making it somewhat clear that
no-endorsement is thought to be a kind of integrity clause:

    Rationale: Encouraging lots of improvement is a good thing, but
users have a right to know who is responsible for the software they
are using. Authors and maintainers have reciprocal right to know what
they're being asked to support and protect their reputations.

The history of open source shows that part of what we here are
thinking about no-endorsement clauses is true: they're unnecessary.
But they also haven't caused any problems that I know of. Should we go
further than that and say they're non-open?

Maybe the increased pertinence of government knowledge and policy
since FLOSS expectations were formed makes may-not-imply-endorsement
more dangerous?

A middle ground, that I'm currently in favor of, would be to add a
comment in the integrity section saying no-endorsement clauses don't
by themselves make a license non-open, but they are superfluous, and
recommended to be no-permission rather than may-not if present at all.

Mike