[okfn-discuss] possible OKD conformant licence: The MirOS Licence

Tue Jul 8 14:22:04 UTC 2008

Rufus Pollock dixit:

>b) Importantly the OKD talks about works as primary and licenses as 
>secondary. Specifically it states [1]
>
>"A work is open if its manner of distribution satisfies the following 
>conditions:"
>
>These conditions extend beyond specific requirements on the licence 

There is a real-world difference:

I can produce software under the BSD/MIT/MirOS/X11/… licence, distri-
bute it and not give source code away. The work would still be “OSI
approved Open Source Software“ since it is covered by that licence,
people just do not have access to the source (possibly, to prevent
OSI from bitching about it, I give tapes of the software away for
US$ 1000, like the University of California did with early BSD ver-
sions… of course, I then cannot prevent recipients from sharing, but
that’d make them lose their fiscal investition ☺).

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
Sometimes they [people] care too much: pretty printers [and syntax highligh-
ting, d.A.] mechanically produce pretty output that accentuates irrelevant
detail in the program, which is as sensible as putting all the prepositions
in English text in bold font.	-- Rob Pike in "Notes on Programming in C"