[Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing

Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel patrice-emmanuel.schmitz at be.unisys.com
Wed Jun 29 08:54:05 UTC 2011


Hi all,
After reading again the three variants for "Option Four", I recommend two of them (new names Four and Five), because they are clearly distinct:
  
The fist one (unmodified) refers to the FSF (and means currently the GPLv3 and AGPLv3):

(Option Four) As a condition on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, We agree to license the Contribution only under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using on the Submission Date for the Material or any licenses which are recommended by the Free Software Foundation for use in GNU projects on or after the Effective Date, whether or not such licenses are subsequently disapproved (including any right to adopt any future version of a license if permitted).


The last one must be modified with "OSI-approved copyleft" (and not simply "copyleft" because without OSI reference proliferation is out of control and because the prohibition to modify the license exists in most proprietary licenses:

(New Option Five) As a condition on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, We agree to license the Contribution only under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using on the Submission Date for the Material or any OSI-approved copyleft license (including any right to adopt any future version of a license if permitted).

This option is really specific as they are an important group of OSI-approved copyleft licenses

The previous Option Five (total permissions) will become Option Six.

Best regards,
Patrice-E. Schmitz
Legal expert - www.OSOR.eu


-----Original Message-----
From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Simon Phipps
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 7:19 PM
To: Allison Randal
Cc: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing

Those two option have different purposes.  The "OSI-Approved" option means "keeping the software open source" and contrasts with the final option of "allowing the software to become proprietary". The "FSF Recommended" option is context-dependent and could probably be replaced (as was suggested) by case-by-case use of a list of licenses in the earlier option.

S.


On 28 Jun 2011, at 14:05, Allison Randal wrote:

> Aye, this is still abandoning the idea of a general "copyleft" option, on the understanding that the general category isn't actually useful. (That few projects or contributors embrace the full set of copyleft licenses, they each embrace their own subset.)
> 
> We have a reference to the "OSI approved" licenses in Option Three, so a corresponding "FSF recommended" in Option Four is a fair parallel (roughly corresponding to the "free software" and "open source" groups within the software freedom community).
> 
> Personally, I could go either way. I like the idea of removing an option for simplicity, but I also want to make sure Harmony openly embraces a diversity of legal approaches. If I had a clear sense that some project wanted to use the generic FSF option, I'd be totally sold on including it, but don't see much harm in including it "just in case".
> 
> Allison
> 
> On 06/28/2011 04:25 PM, Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel wrote:
>> A formal reference to the FSF list of "recommended licenses" is not appropriate, and even less to the "FSF recommended copyleft licenses", because in the FSF "GPL centric" mind, the GPL (read GPLv3 and AGPLv3) is the sole acceptable license. Therefore the list will be (very) short: any time a copyleft enters in conflict with the GPL copyleft, the license is not recommended (worse: you are "urged" not to use it !)
>> This is contradicted by the reality of license proliferation. In fact they are several OSI approved copyleft licenses (including the OSL, GPL, EUPL, Eclipse etc.) and it should not be too difficult to make a subset.
>> Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz
>> Legal expert, www.OSOR.eu
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Allison Randal
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:18 PM
>> To: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>> 
>> One thing dropping Option Four doesn't cover is cultural affiliation of
>> various projects with FSF vs OSI. The FSF has graciously created a page
>> listing copyleft licenses that they recommend, which we can use as the
>> "FSF" option.
>> 
>> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/recommended-copylefts.html
>> 
>> So, with that, I'm suggesting this revised text for Option Four, with
>> the actual link given in the FAQ pages (so it's easy to update later
>> without updating the text of all the generated agreement documents
>> various projects are using):
>> 
>> ------
>> (Option Four) As a condition on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and
>> 2.2, We agree to license the Contribution only under the terms of the
>> license or licenses which We are using on the Submission Date for the
>> Material or any licenses on the Free Software Foundation's list of
>> "Recommended copyleft licenses" on or after the Effective Date, whether
>> or not such licenses are subsequently disapproved (including any right
>> to adopt any future version of a license if permitted).
>> ------
>> 
>> Thoughts, comments?
>> 
>> Allison
>> 
>> On 06/23/2011 08:43 PM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
>>> I think that this is fine too
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Walli Stephen
>>> Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 3:53 AM
>>> To: Allison Randal
>>> Cc: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>>> 
>>> FWIW I like this as an approach.  I think it covers any real world situations I can remember.  stephe
>>> 
>>> On 2011-06-22, at 6:30 PM , Allison Randal wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Mentioned in the meeting minutes, carried on here for further discussion.
>>>> 
>>>> We've talked a lot about how to handle copyleft licenses in the outbound
>>>> license section. All the current options include copyleft licenses, but
>>>> the discussion has ranged over whether we can draft an option that
>>>> covers all copyleft licenses and only copyleft licenses. We added Option
>>>> Four as an attempt at that, but later discovered that the FSF also
>>>> recommends permissive licenses. One proposal was an option for "any
>>>> copyleft license", with a suggestion that copyleft is well enough
>>>> understood to need no definition. But, the following discussion
>>>> indicated that there were many different understandings of what copyleft
>>>> means, and that how to define copyleft in a sufficiently
>>>> broad-but-narrow and future-proof fashion is less than obvious.
>>>> 
>>>> I had a conversation with Bradley Kuhn this week, where he pointed out
>>>> that generically defining copyleft licenses isn't useful, because for
>>>> the copyleft philosophy there's a huge difference between GPL, LGPL and
>>>> AGPL, and projects make very intentional choices on those distinctions.
>>>> 
>>>> My proposal, based on Bradley's comments, is that we drop Option Four,
>>>> and in our usage guide explain that the best way to capture "only
>>>> copyleft licenses" is Option Two with an explicit list of the copyleft
>>>> licenses the project supports.
>>>> 
>>>> Comments?
>>>> 
>>>> Allison
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Harmony-Drafting mailing list
>>>> Harmony-Drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>>> http://lists.harmonyagreements.org/mailman/listinfo/harmony-drafting
>>> 
>>> Stephen R. Walli, Technical Director, OuterCurve Foundation
>>> website: http://www.outercurve.org
>>> mailto:  swalli at outercurve.org
>>> mobile:  +1 425 522 3409
>>> skype:   stephen.walli
>>> blog:    http://stephesblog.blogs.com  (Once More unto the Breach)
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>>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenrwalli
>>> 
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