OSI Certified licenses
Evan Prodromou
evan at wikitravel.org
Mon Apr 26 15:10:07 EDT 2004
So, I am not a lawyer, but I think that some Creative Commons licenses
would satisfy the Open Source Definition:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
...and could be certified as "OSI Approved":
http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php
OSI _does_, in fact, certify licenses not specifically for
software. For example, the Academic Free License 2.0* is on the
OSI-approved list:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.0.php
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
The OSI approval process is pretty straightforward:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php#approval
...although it requires a legal analysis of the licenses.
I think having some of the CC licenses certified as "Open Source"
would be useful for those who want to license work "in the spirit of"
FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software). Note that the Open Source
Definition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines:
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
...so that stuff that's "OSI Certified" will almost always be
"DFSG-free".
In particular, for the 1.0 licenses, I think that these licenses could
be OSI certified:
Attribution
Attribution-ShareAlike
ShareAlike
Obviously, any application for approval would make more sense coming
from within Creative Commons than from a schmuck like me. And part of
the approval process requires having a real lawyer, rather than a
mailing list loudmouth, do an analysis of the license. But I think
it'd be real cool.
~ESP
* Interesting in that it carries a warranty of rights.
--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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