Russ Nelson proposes new license requirements

Posted Mar 2, 2005 22:52 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: Russ Nelson proposes new license requirements by JoeBuck
Parent article: Russ Nelson proposes new license requirements

Yes, "incompatibility" with existing licenses is a problem. Reread the
post you replied to, however. His objection was with calling
"compatibility" with existing licenses a problem. IOW, some companies
deliberately create an incompatible license so code cannot be shared.

Many have accused Sun of doing this with their new license under which
they are sharing Solaris code, deliberately creating a license
incompatible with the GPL so the code cannot be intermingled with that of
Linux. Personally, I think that was one goal, altho another was taking
care of patents, which they seem to have done, but /only/ as long as it's
connected to the Solaris code base, not for open source in general,
unfortunately. Not that I have any particular familiarity with law or the
workings of Sun myself, of course, just based on the reports I've seen.

The idea of course is that Sun wants the PR benefits (they've already
admitted they don't expect much of the usual community code benefits,
because of the license they chose) of an open source license without the
obligation of actually having to in practice share the code with the rest
of the FLOSS community. I believe the intent of the OP was to make it
difficult or impossible for such a deliberately incompatibe license to
gain OSI approval, which anyway doesn't seem in disagreement with what you
stated, after all.

Duncan