I have been sitting back and observing some of the ongoing events regarding LCG, copyright licenses, and even terms of service agreements.
Existing precedence is being ignored if not forgotten.
Long standing language is being redefined.
Parasitic terms of services have been designed and are being used.
My answer to all of this is to clarify the copyright licenses to ensure that the original intent, behavior, and expectations remain and hold true.
Implementing this, however, is a bit tricky.
I do not want to rewrite any existing licenses, such as the LGPL license.
I have decided that the solution is to re-license using a wrapping license in order to avoid directly modifying the wrapped licenses.
The new license only serves a single purpose of providing clarification and protections while still preserving the terms of the wrapped licenses as much as possible.
This new license, called Clarified 1.0, supersedes anything in the wrapped license to provide the necessary protections.
The OSL is directly changed because I wrote the original license and I can just create a new version.
All other licenses are to be wrapped.
The full license terms are available here:
LCG has appeared like a parasite in the computing world.
Consuming software and spitting out a modified form.
Now, any reasonable and sane person that has lived in the computer world for any significant amount of time would realize that computer software revolves around copying.
There are no physical objects to be moved, created, or destroyed.
There is only thought.
And software is a representation of that thought via some set of languages.
To do anything with that thought, it must be copied.
Be it from hard drive to RAM, or be it from one computer to another.
Recent court rulings in various locations have shown that the courts might have lost all memory of existing precedence or might have gotten confused or otherwise tricked by the word games that surrounds LCG.
The terms of services of various services have started sneaking in language to try to get an individual to waive licenses and other matters.
This is at its core is a form of tricker and theft.
A moral entity that provides such a terms of service does not intend to violate these restrictions nor does it intend to engage in any trickery or theft.
Therefore, a reasonable person could conclude that the intent and purpose is not to bypass those restrictions and requirements and is instead targetted towards non-open-source software that is making it available to a given service.
How would a moral entity handle all of these details?
By simply having the proprietary nature waived.
Open-source licenses typical provide language that makes this moot.
There essentially is nothing to waive because it is already made freely available given the terms and restrictions outlined in a particular license.
I could easily and reasonably assume that therefore the open-source licenses are not waived in such cases.
I refuse to assume.
The solution is to create a new license that wraps existing license and modify existing licenses to apply new terms.
Only these terms aren't intended to change either the wrapped license or the modified license.
Instead, these terms clarify the terminology and expectations.
One such expectation is to explicitly state that the licenser themselves may not waive anything.
This helps avoid parasitic terms of services from attempting to trick a person into giving up possession of their copyrighted material or surrender their rights therein.
These restrictions on the licenser do not prohibit the licenser from explicitly, with full intent and knowledge and without coercion of any form, re-licensing something.
This allows for changes without having to worry about any form of parasitic agreements and trickery.
Kevin Day