Roger Binns
2004-01-04 15:35:10 UTC
My final decision is to not change the license (ie leave
it as the Artistic License)
I will be putting something on the BitPim web page saying
that if you didn't get the software from there then
it is a modfied version and people will have to go to
whoever they got it from for support, bugs etc.
The section about attorneys fees continued to worry me. I had
several emails with the attorney who created the license. He
is also the attorney for OSI (opensource.org). He said it was
fine.
There were two weaknesses I saw. One is that the fees applied
to *any* action to enforce the license. It wasn't limited to
only cases brought by the copyright holders.
Secondly jurisdiction of cases is required in the locality of
the licensors. However with multiple contributors, hopefully
all over the world combined with the previous paragraph, things
start getting silly. (For example did you know that in Germany
you can bring trademark lawsuits against people even if you
don't hold the trademark. This has happened several times to
parts of the KDE project).
So I asked the lawyer if I could have a modified version of
the license with the attorney fee section removed. He said
no. The irony of him being the attorney to an organisation
dedicated to people publishing software and letting others
have the ability to share and modify it, yet him not allowing
the same was not lost on me.
Quite frankly he continued the line of lawyers/attorneys I
have come into contact with throughout my life, and I have
yet to actually like a single one. In fact after my experience
dealing with him, I will not support OSI/opensource.org
in any way since they have an attorney like him.
I was also talking to somone else about this, and they
mentioned that with the licenses there is safety in numbers.
The more people using a license, the more people there will
be who will want to help defend its integrity if things came
to that. I could only find a total of ~170 projects using
OSL. There are huge numbers using the GPL and a good
portion using the Artistic license. The figures on SF
make good reading. Note that a lot of Artistic License
stuff is in the Perl community and not hosted on SF.
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=14
The following two pages also useful:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s04.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s05.html
Roger
it as the Artistic License)
I will be putting something on the BitPim web page saying
that if you didn't get the software from there then
it is a modfied version and people will have to go to
whoever they got it from for support, bugs etc.
The section about attorneys fees continued to worry me. I had
several emails with the attorney who created the license. He
is also the attorney for OSI (opensource.org). He said it was
fine.
There were two weaknesses I saw. One is that the fees applied
to *any* action to enforce the license. It wasn't limited to
only cases brought by the copyright holders.
Secondly jurisdiction of cases is required in the locality of
the licensors. However with multiple contributors, hopefully
all over the world combined with the previous paragraph, things
start getting silly. (For example did you know that in Germany
you can bring trademark lawsuits against people even if you
don't hold the trademark. This has happened several times to
parts of the KDE project).
So I asked the lawyer if I could have a modified version of
the license with the attorney fee section removed. He said
no. The irony of him being the attorney to an organisation
dedicated to people publishing software and letting others
have the ability to share and modify it, yet him not allowing
the same was not lost on me.
Quite frankly he continued the line of lawyers/attorneys I
have come into contact with throughout my life, and I have
yet to actually like a single one. In fact after my experience
dealing with him, I will not support OSI/opensource.org
in any way since they have an attorney like him.
I was also talking to somone else about this, and they
mentioned that with the licenses there is safety in numbers.
The more people using a license, the more people there will
be who will want to help defend its integrity if things came
to that. I could only find a total of ~170 projects using
OSL. There are huge numbers using the GPL and a good
portion using the Artistic license. The figures on SF
make good reading. Note that a lot of Artistic License
stuff is in the Perl community and not hosted on SF.
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=14
The following two pages also useful:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s04.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s05.html
Roger