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No one wants yet another license. Is there an explanation about why Unlicense is not appropriate? Or what it would take for an Unlicense derivative to meet the

by lloydde 10y ago

No one wants yet another license. Is there an explanation about why Unlicense is not appropriate? Or what it would take for an Unlicense derivative to meet the legal requirements? Could the laws be changed in small ways to allow US Government employees to more fully participate in open source? "The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license." http://unlicense.org/ http://unlicense.org/ I like how other commenters have included other successfully US.gov and specifically DoD open source such as BRL-CAD and NSA's Apache Accumulo. And the DoD Open Source FAQ is interesting and something I haven't seen before: http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ Open source and US.gov participation reminds me of what happened with NASA Nova. It was pretty sad that when OpenStack became relevant in the industry that seemed to cause a panic at NASA and they pulled completely out of OpenStack development. Instead of NASA being to help the project stay focused on being opinionated enough to be generally useful (out of the box), NASA was too afraid about the perception of competing with proprietary commercial interests. (It was nice to see last year, all these years later, that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is now a user again having purchased RedHat OpenStack.)

rectang 10y ago
> Is there an explanation about why Unlicense is not appropriate? The Unlicense was not drafted by legal professionals. Please do not use. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001381.html https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-J... CC0 is better. However, it still has issues in that it explicitly disclaims patent grants. We still don't have a solid license of this class.
- lloydde 10y ago
  Thanks for that link. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001386.html https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-J... provided more details. Has the Open Source Initiative otherwise tried to find a solution such that software works of the United States government would have a clean path to be compatible with Open Source? CC0 may be better if you are looking for international agreement, though it seems like the patent related clause resulted in the review by opensource.org to be abandoned. "CC0 was not explicitly rejected, but the License Review Committee was unable to reach consensus that it should be approved, and Creative Commons eventually withdrew the application. The most serious of the concerns raised had to do with the effects of clause 4(a), which reads: "No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.". While many open source licenses simply do not mention patents, it is exceedingly rare for open source licenses to explicitly disclaim any conveyance of patent rights, and the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0." https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero
webmaven 10y ago
> It was pretty sad that when OpenStack became relevant in the industry that seemed to cause a panic at NASA and they pulled completely out of OpenStack development. As I understand the sequence of events, NASA didn't pull out of OpenStack because they got cold feet, the folks at NASA who drove the contribution of code from the Nebula project that became OpenStack Nova started to see $$$ and went off with the rest of their code to found the OpenNebula project as well as the OpenNebula Systems company. The folks remaining at NASA were then left with an unpalatable choice of picking favorites between a consortium of vendors and a spin-off.
- lloydde 10y ago
  I suspect those are factors as well, but I think we're both trying to make sense of the timeline. I came to OpenStack after the dust had settled. The stories I've heard focused on how exhausting the process of getting NASA approval to open source Nova was. I can't see all of the NASA contributors being motivated by $$$ money. It seems NASA wasn't configured for continued stewardship and for their hackers to keep on hacking. A point of correction, NASA Nebula became OpenStack Nova and one of the spin-offs was Nebula.com which folded and some of the team went to Oracle. That Nebula is completely different than (the European) OpenNebula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNebula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNebula
  - webmaven 10y ago
    Right. When the Ames CTO left to form Nebula and took soem personnel with him, that also removed advocates from within NASA: https://gigaom.com/2011/07/27/ex-nasa-cto-builds-cloud-dream-team-launches-nebula/ https://gigaom.com/2011/07/27/ex-nasa-cto-builds-cloud-dream... But my understanding is that the European OpenNebula grew out of some of the same initial NASA Nebula code, and some folks went to the US subsidiary they created. Now, while I was paying attention at the time, I didn't exactly have a front-row seat, and my memory could be wrong - three open source projects and three companies all with near identical names is a bit confusing!
    - lloydde 10y ago

by lloydde 10y ago

rectang 10y ago

> Is there an explanation about why Unlicense is not appropriate? The Unlicense was not drafted by legal professionals. Please do not use. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001381.html https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-J... CC0 is better. However, it still has issues in that it explicitly disclaims patent grants. We still don't have a solid license of this class.

lloydde 10y ago
Thanks for that link. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001386.html https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-J... provided more details. Has the Open Source Initiative otherwise tried to find a solution such that software works of the United States government would have a clean path to be compatible with Open Source? CC0 may be better if you are looking for international agreement, though it seems like the patent related clause resulted in the review by opensource.org to be abandoned. "CC0 was not explicitly rejected, but the License Review Committee was unable to reach consensus that it should be approved, and Creative Commons eventually withdrew the application. The most serious of the concerns raised had to do with the effects of clause 4(a), which reads: "No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.". While many open source licenses simply do not mention patents, it is exceedingly rare for open source licenses to explicitly disclaim any conveyance of patent rights, and the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0." https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

webmaven 10y ago

> It was pretty sad that when OpenStack became relevant in the industry that seemed to cause a panic at NASA and they pulled completely out of OpenStack development. As I understand the sequence of events, NASA didn't pull out of OpenStack because they got cold feet, the folks at NASA who drove the contribution of code from the Nebula project that became OpenStack Nova started to see $$$ and went off with the rest of their code to found the OpenNebula project as well as the OpenNebula Systems company. The folks remaining at NASA were then left with an unpalatable choice of picking favorites between a consortium of vendors and a spin-off.

lloydde 10y ago
I suspect those are factors as well, but I think we're both trying to make sense of the timeline. I came to OpenStack after the dust had settled. The stories I've heard focused on how exhausting the process of getting NASA approval to open source Nova was. I can't see all of the NASA contributors being motivated by $$$ money. It seems NASA wasn't configured for continued stewardship and for their hackers to keep on hacking. A point of correction, NASA Nebula became OpenStack Nova and one of the spin-offs was Nebula.com which folded and some of the team went to Oracle. That Nebula is completely different than (the European) OpenNebula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNebula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNebula
- webmaven 10y ago
  Right. When the Ames CTO left to form Nebula and took soem personnel with him, that also removed advocates from within NASA: https://gigaom.com/2011/07/27/ex-nasa-cto-builds-cloud-dream-team-launches-nebula/ https://gigaom.com/2011/07/27/ex-nasa-cto-builds-cloud-dream... But my understanding is that the European OpenNebula grew out of some of the same initial NASA Nebula code, and some folks went to the US subsidiary they created. Now, while I was paying attention at the time, I didn't exactly have a front-row seat, and my memory could be wrong - three open source projects and three companies all with near identical names is a bit confusing!
  - lloydde 10y ago