Re: (re-)evaluation of notabug.org

[Aaron Wolf]

Watcom, not Watfor

And to be clear, OSI lists that in the "non-reusable" licenses, as in
they aren't general licenses that anyone but the original authors use.

Similarly the other "reciprocal" ones that do not allow modifications to
be private should never have been approved. Thankfully, I don't think
they are used in practice. They seem to all be in the OSI's list of
superseded or deprecated or similar.

So, in practice OSI-approved is not strictly adequate but it appears
that 100% of the actual licenses ever used on a site like Sourceforge
are all truly free software licenses.

How much do we care about this distinction? In contrast to other hosts
that actually host non-free-software, Sourceforge's OSI-approved
requirement has led in practice to be effectively a
free-software-requirement. I'm not aware of any actual use of the
obscure non-free OSI-approved licenses for current software.

Of course, the OSI could approve of new non-free licenses, and that
would be an additional and more serious problem.

On 2021-04-17 8:40 p.m., Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > although the website itself does not list specific licenses,
>   > still, the sourceforge licensing requirements are more libre
>   > than what is typical...
>   > so, unless
>   > the OSI approves some non-free licenses, sourceforge probably
>   > satisfies A4, where most others would not
> 
> The OSI has approved several non-libre licenses.
> One of them is the Reciprocal Public License.
> Another is the Open Watfor license.
> 
> So this doesn't entirely satisfy A4, but comes closer.
> 
> 
>