[ILUG] [UKUUG] BCS OS Licence - London 24/07/07

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

Brian Foster <blf at utvinternet.ie> writes:
>  I've no idea what this is about (i.e., why they
>   are proposing/discussing any such thing).
>    whatever, this may be interest to some ....

A discussion on the fsfe-uk list may have uncovered the reasons:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/fsfe-uk/2007-07/msg00002.html

The highlights:

According to BCS "under English law the GPL as written provides no right to
run the software", which is a strange interpretation of the relevent part of
the GPL, which says "The act of running the Program is not restricted".

And the suggested benefits of this new licence are:

        "The BCS stands to benefit from the BSL in a number of ways.
         * There is the reward for leading the way on Open Source
        licensing.
         * The BSL license process will generate a revenue to help pay
        for the maintenance of databases. Charges can be discounted for
        BCS members, thereby encouraging membership.
         * The licence and code databases represent an exploitable asset
        for the BCS."

That said, I know guys in the BCS OSSG that are fairly clued in about free
software, so I guess this just hasn't been discussed seriously or widely
enough internally yet.

After eighteen months of working on GPLv3, I can tell them that licence
drafting processes do not generate revenue.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org