Re: contracts vs. licenses, OSI, and Debian (was: The QPL licence)
Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 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.
I think you've summed up what I was trying to say. :-)
> If the latter, then his opinion seems to directly contradict Eben
> Moglen's:
>
> http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-12.html
Right; I assumed the former because of this.
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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