Both OSL and AFL This license is Copyright ( ) 2003 Lawrence E. Rosen. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute this license without modification. This license may not be modified without the express written permission of its copyright owner. |
Most licenses identify their author and copyright owner. The OSL/AFL licenses do also. Because of the risk of proliferation of different versions of the OSL and AFL licenses, I do not currently license others to modify them. I recognize that this conflicts in a subtle way with the Open Source Principles. But I am allowed, under the copyright laws, to do precisely that. I am merely exercising my exclusive right, under the copyright law, to control derivative works of my licenses. This provision assumes that a software license is copyrightable subject matter, but it isn't clear to me that the expression of a license doesn't merge with its ideas , rendering it uncopyrightable. Anyone who has made it this far into this book and wants to engage in a philosophical discussion about that topic is invited to send me email about whether a license can be copyrighted . Comparison to Other Licenses The BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses say nothing about license ownership. The Artistic license says nothing about license ownership. There are various versions of the Artistic license in use today. For example, notice that section 10 of the Artistic License doesn't appear in all versions of that license. The GPL contains the following copyright and license notice: Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. ( GPL first paragraph.) The MPL contains no copyright notice but it says this about the license: If You create or use a modified version of this License (which you may only do in order to apply it to code which is not already Covered Code governed by this License), You must (a) rename Your license so that the phrases "Mozilla", "MOZILLAPL", "MOZPL", "Netscape", " MPL ", "NPL" or any confusingly similar phrase do not appear in your license (except to note that your license differs from this License) and (b) otherwise make it clear that Your version of the license contains terms which differ from the Mozilla Public License and Netscape Public License. (Filling in the name of the Initial Developer, Original Code or Contributor in the notice described in Exhibit A shall not of themselves be deemed to be modifications of this License.) ( MPL section 6.3.) The CPL contains no copyright notice but it says this about the license: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute copies of this Agreement, but in order to avoid inconsistency the Agreement is copyrighted and may only be modified in the following manner. The Agreement Steward reserves the right to publish new versions (including revisions) of this Agreement from time to time. No one other than the Agreement Steward has the right to modify this Agreement. IBM is the initial Agreement Steward. IBM may assign the responsibility to serve as the Agreement Steward to a suitable separate entity. ( CPL section 7.) | 