On 10:09 AM -0500 3/2/05, Russell Nelson doth scribe: >11. *The license must not be duplicative.* This seems like an administrative detail, not a principle of the open source movement. NY Times: Mr. Nelson, what does the open source movement stand for?" Nelson: "We stand for free access to source code, and non-duplicative licenses". It would be like Moses adding "thou shalt file thy taxes on time" to be the 11th commandment. It seems like this belongs on the "Getting a License Approved" section. As in, after Bullet Point 4, say "the board reserves the right to reject any license that is similar in form or effect to an existing license". >12. *The license must be clearly written, simple, and understandable.* > Open-source licenses are written to serve people who are not > attorneys, and they need to be comprehensible by people who are > not attorneys. Am I missing something? I though open source licenses were written to allocate the rights to a programmer's efforts in a way that is enforceable in a court of law. I realize that Larry Rosen may today be a controversial figure here, but read his book (or that of Andrew St. Laurent) on some of the "clearly written" licenses. They may be appealing to a programmer, but who knows what a court will decide if they're ever tested? And if they make an attorney throw up his hands in despair, what company will use them? I agree the goal is that shorter and clearer are better, but we should not sacrifice legal accuracy either. >13. *The license must be reusable*. Agreed. > If the license contains proper > names of individuals, associations, or projects, these must be > incorporated by reference from an attachment that declares the > names of the issuer and any other cited parties, and which can be > modified without changing the terms of the license. Incorporated by reference? Or changed within the license by template substitution. Again, the incorporated by reference may have some legal disadvantages. > As the sole > exception, the license may name its owner and steward. Define "steward". Does this mean that we encourage people to copyright their licenses? If so, I think there should be a policy as to what license should be used, because any license should be reusable (like code) to make a new license. We wouldn't have the Sleepycat license (from BSD) or the IPL/CPL (from Mozilla) without this principle. Joel -- Joel West Silicon Valley Open Source Research Project http://www.cob.sjsu.edu/OpenSource/