New OSS License: the CDL | Hacker News Reader

New OSS License: the CDL

supertunaman.com

24 pointsibejoeb16 comments

The interesting part is the response from the OSI, who appear to be taking it at least semi-seriously. According to The Register ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/chicken_dance_open_s...):

"Clause 4 appears to conflict with OSD clause 5 because people with disabilities or cultural obligations preventing them from either singing or dancing (or religious issues portraying chickens) would not have equal freedoms under the license,"

and

"It also violates OSD clause 6 as it would prevent use in the plinth industry"

The OSI spokesman appears to be have not really understood the license. It is really two licenses. The first 3 clauses are the open source license. The 4th clause gives an alternative non-open license that the software is available under for those who do not wish to use an open source license.

I've never actually laughed when reading a license before. This is so funny that I might have to make a new project JUST to license it with the CDL.

I prefer the original CDL, the commercial drivers license, with that you can certainly go far.

zing!

The section 4. makes this a proprietary license.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems no more proprietary than the BSD license (which it seems to be based on).

You need to read a little more closely. Section 4 is just stuff you have to do if you don't want to redistribute with source code.

4. An entity wishing to redistribute in binary form or include this software in their product without redistribution of this software's source code with the product must also submit to these conditions where applicable: ...

But plinth is a perfectly cromulent word.

Indeed, it embiggens the validicity of the license.

It's all very muldipulous if you ask me.

We're thinking of dropping the plinth clause. It does discriminate against fields of endeavor, such as the plinth industry. Right now in the drafting repo, it has been changed to a word made up by Garfield, but now we're effectively discriminating against Jim Davis. I wouldn't think it to be a problem, but we do actually want to meet OSD.

Instead of making up joke licences someone should sit down and write a licence tailored for software that is roughly equivalent to a CC-BY-SA-NC.

NC would conflict with the Free Redistribution criteria of the Open Source Definition[1], and BY would be the equivalent of the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause"[2].

And besides all that, I really don't think the world needs yet another GPL-incompatible licence. You effectively wall off your code from being used in the vast majority of the ecosystem and vice-versa, and you end up with a scenario like Sun's CDDL where developers have a disincentive to work on your code due to its incompatible licensing, and they have to jump through hoops to integrate it with anything else. Unless those effects are desirable to you, you're better off just picking a compatible licence[3].

[1] http://opensource.org/docs/osd

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Yes, I know it's not "proper" open source if you can't sell it, but I think there is clearly a demand for that kind of licence.

Oh please, this is a bad joke, not even funny.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com