Re: OSI affiliation
Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:41:10 +0000, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> > Jose Luis Rivas <ghostbar@debian.org>
> > > Just to give context to your email, could you provide a list with the
> > > OSI-approved licenses that you call non-free? (Maybe a link) [...]
> > http://people.debian.org/~mjr/legal/fsf-osi-list-diff.txt
> > shows the ones where OSI and FSF disagree, but what's the
> > point of knowing which are involved? Basically, OSI has
> > aided proliferation.
>
> That list doesn't answer the question asked, in that I imagine that some
> or all of those licenses are what we'd accept as free.
No, I know, but I was trying to question what the point of it was: the
debian project accepts software not licences. After all, we don't
really care if a licence is free but the application is botched or
something else causes the software to fail to meet the DFSG.
Contrarily, OSI never used to care if there was worthwhile software,
only if there was a scary lawyer.
> I'd be rather more interested in a list of licenses that are all of:
>
> a) approved by OSI
> b) rejected by us
> c) actually applied to software that is otherwise worth packaging,
> and hence where OSI is doing real harm by muddying the water.
Listings welcome, but I suspect that's not reasonable: flat-out
rejections are rather hard to find and reviewing all software is a
very big job.
When I last checked non-free, I spotted only the Apple Public Source
License that you mentioned from the OSI approved list. That might
mean that none of the others is used for software worth packaging, it
might mean that they don't even allow distribution in debian, or -
most probably - that I didn't notice it.
Hope that informs,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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