Le 03/02/2011 08:08, Ciaran Farrell a écrit : (b) a variation on an 'accepted' license
For what it's worth, I think the work that Fedora has done on classification is quite good: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing
jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
Thanks for getting this moving. Would it be helpful to have an exhaustive list of licenses which we classify as 'acceptable', so that a packager could quickly search through the list to determine whether it's worthwhile packaging software which won't be accepted in Factory?
yes, it's necessary to end with this. We also have to say *who* is, in the end, responsible of accepting or rejecting the inclusion of a software, and chhosing in what repository it's accepted (OSS, non-OSS, full distro or only OBS)
hints: openSUSE board, creation of a licence team including lawers (easier when the foundation works)
It would definitely help to ask lawyers as e.g. the colums regarding GPL compatibility on the fedora page makes no sense. If you strictly follow the claims from the GPL (even though some claims are violating the law), the GPL would be incompatible to any other license including BSD and if you follow the papers from various lawyers (that explain which parts of the GPL are void because they are in violation with the law), GPLd software can be combined with any other license by creating a collective work. In addition, the GPL is just one of many licenses and it is a mistake to put it into the a central position. In any case, the current suse webpage is not a good starter as it quotes the FSF where a pointer to a _neutral_ organisation without corporate interests would be needed. The Open Source Initiative is such a neutral organisation. The FSF on the other side is no more than a provider of one or more competive products (licenses) and for this reason, it is wise not to rely on statements from the FSF. Important issues for selecting licenses are patent protection and collaborative support, as well the importance of a license. OSSCC.net gives an overview on the "imortant" licenses (those licenses that have been selected by the OSI with the license proliferation project). Please check the table at: http://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html#compatibility If you weight general usability, patent protection and collaborative support and the fact that there are two major license types (academic and reciprocal/copyleft), it is even possible to select a winner for both classes: The best academic license is the Apache-2.0 license as it is permissive and includes patent protection/defense at the same time. The best reciprocal/copyleft license is the CDDL-1.0 as it does not raise claims that cannot be enforced in court and as it includes patent protection/defense at the same time. This is a result, that has been independently retrieved by OSSCC and some members of the OSI. The OSI however (as a neutral organisation) does not publish such comparisons. In any case, before copying unsourced statements from a non-neutral site, it makes sense to look at the OpenSOource definition: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php and at the list os aproved OSS licenses: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical There are 67 aproved OSS licenses. With licenses that are not in that list, you should be very careful..... Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org