Re: Re: L-GPL or BSD license for MCF libraries ?

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 11:51:41PM +0200, Steve Lhomme wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> Yeah, the pb we have is that anyone could take the code, modify it for 
> his own MCF derived format and pretend it's MCF while it's not. We have 
> to avoid forks to ensure compatibility (which is very important). BSD 
> can't help in that territory.

Actually, no license can help with that.  If somebody wants to modify the code
to make their own format and pretend their format is still MCF, no open-source
license will prevent them.  The only thing these licenses you're considering
will do in that regard is let you adopt their new changes/format as part of the
official MCF stuff if you want to (which you probably won't).

> > Note that a license doesn't _need_ to be OSI-approved to be useful.. it's
> > really mainly a formality, as most people don't care whether an open-source
> > license is "OSI approved" or not, just whether it's open.
> 
> It is for a software hosted on SourceForge. Otherwise you can't !

That's not true.  You can specify a non-OSI license for sourceforge projects,
it just requires that the sourceforge folks look it over themselves to verify
that it does follow open-source principles.  There is a well-defined procedure
for that.  The OSI thing is just a convenience for the sourceforge admins so
they don't have to inspect every new license for every project by hand.

-alex


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