How to describe the acceptable terms to receive documentation?

[stefano]

The main difference I see between the terms OSD-compliant and OSD-compatible is that compliant is a legally charged term, it feels more strict and in my mind, leads to a strict evaluation and approval process. Compatible suggests a lightweight review that anyone can do, it doesn’t lead necessarily to requiring a new list of approved licenses. I may be wrong

@hook

• OSD-compliant would mean that documentation would need to be under a license that fulfils all ten OSD criteria, and many of those are quite software-specific. This could be tricky, there is a reason why OSI hasn’t approved (m)any non-software licenses thus far.

It would be tricky but possible, right? OSI could create a special category of licenses for documentation only: we have the infrastructure and also the time to get the board to approve this by October. @pchestek @Kappa What do you think? If we say documentation of Open Source AI needs to be available with OSD-compliant terms, do we need to create a special category of OSI Approved Licenses for documentation?

@hook

• as for OSD-compatible, it seems a bit ambiguous what that even means. So many proprietary licenses are compatible with so many (non-copyleft) OSD-compliant licenses, that I fear this means almost nothing. (Well, not exactly nothing, as it does mean the documentation license cannot remove the FOSS’ness of the code license, at least.)

I’m reading the words OSD-compatible differently. To me that means compatible with the points of the Open Source Definition not compatible with existing licenses. In practice, this would mean that a system with documentation shared with CC-BY would pass while one using CC-BY-NC wouldn’t.

@hook

Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) has their own “Open Definition”, which is perhaps the best drafted definition of open data and open content I’ve seen so far:

I agree with you, that’d be a good definition. But the OKFN is currently reviewing the Open Definition, and judging the first round of comments, it makes me wonder if the principles of open will survive the review.

@hook

A further complication is whether (for code) we’d also consider licenses that are tagged as:

Maybe it’s a complication, I’m not sure. In any case, I think this is not an issue worth analyzing now because it applies also to “classic” software.