Re: contracts vs. licenses, OSI, and Debian (was: The QPL licence)
On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 05:45:39PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Indeed. Larry Rosen, who is an attorney and is the legal advisor to the
> Board of the Open Source Initiative[1], is a major advocate of
> converting copyright licenses into contracts[2], as are major media[3]
> and proprietary software[4][5] companies.
>
> I personally think this explains a great many of the divergences between
> Debian's assessment of licenses and OSI's.
> [2] http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GL19.pdf
This seems to be "form contracts to ensure licenses are enforcable". I
wonder if the OSI is actively recommending licenses that go beyond copyright
law, or if contracts are being recommended even for licenses that do not.
If the former, then I'd agree with you, since we tend to view most licenses
that go beyond copyright law as non-free.
If the latter, then his opinion seems to directly contradict Eben Moglen's:
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-12.html
--
Glenn Maynard
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