From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267363AbTGWKgI (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jul 2003 06:36:08 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267401AbTGWKgI (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jul 2003 06:36:08 -0400 Received: from pat.ukc.ac.uk ([129.12.21.15]:36075 "EHLO pat") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267363AbTGWKgC (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jul 2003 06:36:02 -0400 To: Andre Hedrick Cc: "Adam J. Richter" , andersen@codepoet.org, jgarzik@pobox.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Promise SATA driver GPL'd References: From: Adam Sampson Organization: Don't wake me, 'cos I'm dreaming, and I might just stay inside again today. Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 11:40:37 +0100 In-Reply-To: (Andre Hedrick's message of "Tue, 22 Jul 2003 22:28:26 -0700 (PDT)") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-UKC-Mail-System: No virus detected Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Andre Hedrick writes: > To bad people do not see the lameness of GPL and the superior > quality of OSL. >>From a not-a-lawyer viewpoint, there's one major thing that concerns me about the OSL 1.1 (the text of which is available on opensource.org): If You distribute copies of the Original Work or a Derivative Work, You must make a reasonable effort under the circumstances to obtain the express and volitional assent of recipients to the terms of this License. This "click-wrap" requirement sounds like it would cause problems for mirror sites; we'd have to either make our users accept that there might be software licensed under the OSL somewhere on the site before browsing any of it -- which is ridiculous, since the vast majority of our mirrored software isn't under such a license -- or scan all software we mirror for OSL licenses and require acceptance on a per-file basis, which would be possible, but a reasonably large amount of development work, and annoying both for users and for other sites mirroring from us. In particular, how are we meant to enforce this for an FTP or rsync server? We can put "Downloading software under the terms of the OSL requires acceptance of the terms; logging in to this server indicates your acceptance of these terms" or something similar in our message-of-the-day, but that doesn't seem like "expressing assent" when we know full well that the majority of FTP users won't get shown the MOTD. Now, we could argue that just putting a notice in our terms and conditions saying that we might have OSL-licensed software would be a "reasonable effort", but there's no guarantee that the copyright owner would consider this reasonable, and it certainly doesn't seem compliant with the spirit of the license. (Essentially, this is the same problem that the GPL has with defining a "derivative work"; the OPL doesn't fix this problem either.) I also don't like the idea of having to do this for every future license that appears that also includes these terms. Otherwise, the license looks like a nice idea. But this clause, if it's intended to do what I think it is, would cause serious problems for the large number of mirror sites out there who carry free software. (The other concerns I've seen voiced about this license are the "External Deployment" section, which I'm quite happy with, and the validity of the "Jurisdiction" and "Attorneys' Fees" sections, which look like a nice idea that wouldn't actually be possible under some jurisdictions -- have a look in the archives of debian-legal for some more-informed discussion about this.) -- Adam Sampson