Re: Re: License/Use settings

Mark Bainter <[email protected]> wrote:

> I was however, thinking that it should be possible to have certain basic
> groupings for licenses.  I would suggest at least four provided groups,
> which could be extended by the user if they wanted to customize these,
> or add their own groups to the mix.
> 
> FREE: Only OSI-Approved Licenses
> SOURCE_AVAILABLE: Anything the source is provided for
> NON_COMMERCIAL: Anything freely available.  Source might be closed, or
>                 require special hoops to obtain.
> ANYTHING_GOES: All licenses.

I think the basic idea here is very good, but I don't think that
creating a complicated system for selecting licensing policies is
a very good idea.  I'd propose that at installation-time there
should be the choice between four options and an additional fifth
which would be "enter an URL of a configuration file which defines
the licensing policy that you want to use".  This allows to create a
company-wide policy and corresponding configuration file that the
company can then use for every Zynot install.

Some nitpicks concerning the proposed category names and definitions:

 * There is Free Software with an ok but somewhat non-standard
   license that no-one has bothered to get OSI approval for.
   (I am here talking of licensing that would be considered
   acceptable both by FSF and by OSI but for which no-one has
   asked for OSI approval).

 * If a program uses a patented algorithm or something, the program
   may have an OSI-approved license without the program truly being
   Free Software.

 * Any license can be used for commercial software.  For example the
   GNU GPL is a good choice for commercial Free Software (see
   http.//FreeStrategy.info for more information about this).  For
   this reason I think that "NON_COMMERCIAL" should be avoided as a
   description of licensing terms.

So here is my suggestion of categories:


OSI-Approved:  Programs with OSI-approved license and no known patent
  related issues.

FREE:  Programs which satisfy the criteria of OSI's "open source
  definition" and FSF's "free software definition".

SOURCE_AVAILABLE: Anything the source is provided for.

ANYTHING_GOES: All licenses.  Source might be closed, or require
  special hoops to obtain.


This set of categories has the nice property that OSI-Approved is
a subset of FREE, wich is a subset of SOURCE_AVAILABLE, which is a
subset of ANYTHING_GOES.

> I'd personally suggest a default of SOURCE_AVAILABLE, from a usability
> perspective, but wouldn't object too strongly to a default setting of
> FREE, so that those who want to claim the moral high ground, but not have
> to put in any of the intellectual effort could still do so.

I'd argue that *if* there has to be a default, it should be FREE
instead of SOURCE_AVAILABLE in order to avoid encouraging the
creation of non-free source-available programs which are wrongly
marketed as "open source".

Alternatively, choice of licensing policy could be a required step
at installation-time.  Users still have the freedom to click on
ANYTHING_GOES without considering the issue (so the freedom to remain
ignorant is not violated by this approach) but people would be
encouraged to look into the matter and learn what Free Software is
all about.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch