RPL 1.5 discussion

Tue Sep 18 23:04:04 UTC 2007

On Sep 18, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Scott Shattuck wrote:
> I'd like to second William's request and respectfully ask that the 
> RPL 1.5 be summarily approved at the next board meeting.

Russ doesn't track license submissions without "For approval:" in the 
Subject header, but I agree that the original submission should have 
received more attention.
> Revisions to the RPL v1.1 (originally approved in November of 2002) 
> were submitted in April of 2006, largely in response to objections 
> raised by the FSF when they noted that the RPL was the only 
> software license that was both OSI-approved and "non-free".

Agreed-- one of the two big concerns I have over the RPL is the 
notion that you can't run your own modified version of the software 
without having to redistribute your changes, which is why the FSF 
considers it "non-free". The exception for "personal use" in 1.11 
restricts private commercial use unless one publishes those changes 
to the world. This isn't strictly against the OSD #6, but it is 
coming closer than most copyleft licenses do.
The second concern I have is that the RPL tries to claim it applies 
not just to derivative works but potentially to a completely separate 
application which was written from the ground up which merely 
communicates over the network to an RPL'ed application. Using 
publicly published APIs to talk to your RPL'ed program from separate 
code I've written myself does not mean my code must be licensed under 
your terms.
This isn't something which is against any part of the Open-Source 
Definition, but it's unfortunate nevertheless. I don't want to 
recommend against approval, but neither do I feel that the license is 
solidly grounded in the claims it asserts...
-- 
-Chuck