Terminology (was: Please review our new charter)

[MJ Ray]

Stefano Maffulli <smaffulli at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] At the moment one can safely assume that all
> software classified as Free/LIbre by FSF standard is also Open Source
> by OSI standard. [...]

If anyone cares about the differences between the actual approvals, a
current pseudo-diff is at
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/legal/fsf-osi-list-diff.txt

Many of the differences are a result of process differences.  As I
understand it, a lawyer advocates a licence in the OSI process, so it
requires the licensor to contribute (and many licensors couldn't care
less about OSI); but FSF does an independent review, so FSF has to
decide it's worth reviewing.  In case it's not obvious, I think FSF's
independent foundation-led review is much the better of those two.

There are two licences that OSI approved but FSF lists as non-free:
NASA Open Source Agreement and the Reciprocal Public License.  Both of
these are "send-back-ware" which many debian developers agree are
non-free (OSI's OSDefinition is based on the Debian Free Software
Guidelines), but I think an early OSI advisor thought was a good idea,
so those approvals look like an OSI bug to me.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
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