OSLiC

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OSLiC, the Open Source License Compendi­um is a guide­line to enable com­pa­nies and oth­er groups eas­i­ly to enable their guys to act accord­ing to the Open Source Licens­es.

Repos­i­to­ry Scope PDF

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As an employ­ee of Deutsche Telekom AG and as Prin­ci­pal Open Source Advi­sor in the Telekom Open Source Pro­gram Office, I had the hon­or to devel­op and main­tain this e‑Book for decades. The readme file in the GitHub repos­i­to­ry describes the goals in some­thing like this:

The abbre­vi­a­tion OSLiC stands for ‘Telekom Open Source License Compendi­um’. The file name or pack­age name is ‘oslic’. This work shall be a reli­able spec­i­fi­ca­tion of how open-source soft­ware can be used in a reg­u­lar man­ner. In par­tic­u­lar, it shall …

  • sup­port Open Source users to act accord­ing to the Open Source License require­ments with­out hav­ing to become license experts them­selves
  • offer strong­ly reli­able and quick­ly acces­si­ble instruc­tions (to-do lists) on how to ful­fill a touched Open Source license
  • con­sol­i­date reli­able back­ground knowl­edge by gath­er­ing and ver­i­fy­ing infor­ma­tion from the net and from libraries

The OSLiC is a set of LaTeX files, Bib­Tex files, and Make­files by which any user can com­pile this com­pendi­um as PDF file. Deutsche Telekom has decid­ed to release OSLiC under CC BY-SA 3.0 Ger­many. Sub­se­quent­ly, OSLiC became the basis for OSCAd and OSCake.


And in what way is this …

… part of the over­ar­ch­ing top­ic FOSS Com­pli­ance? For ful­fill­ing the require­ments of FOSS licens­es, we have to con­sid­er spe­cif­ic indi­vid­ual cas­es as well as side effects — for soft­ware, pic­tures, or doc­u­ments. We should unhide trends and write guide­lines. Above all, how­ev­er, we must dri­ve for­ward the automa­tion of license ful­fill­ment, make our licens­ing knowl­edge freely avail­able, cast it into small­er tools, and bring it into larg­er sys­tems: Because FOSS thrives on free­dom through license ful­fill­ment, large and small. That’s what also this arti­cle is about.


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