Larry is going to talk about the Academic Free Licenses and the Open Software License:

• AFL: not reciprocal (like the BSD)
• OSL: reciprocal (like the GPL)

The idea behind these two is to create two licenses that cover the ground between the GPL on the one hand, and the BSD on the other. The OSL lists all the provisions in section 106 of (US) copyright. The OSL contains the reciprocal (viral) clause. The AFL does not include that clause. The idea here is to provide two licenses that are mostly the same, but allow for that difference.

These licenses don't define "Derivative Work", leaving that as an exercise to the courts and lawyers. These licenses try to spell out that you get patent rights based on those that are embodied in the original work, and that they carry through to derivative works. The OSL license also try to mail down the concept of "distribution" by defining an "External Deployment" as any use by someone other than you. The AFL doesn't deal with this, as it doesn't care about reciprocity. Note that this definition calls ASP usage a "distribution".

So I asked - what if you offered a virtual Linux box as part of a grid service? that counts as a distribution in this sense, according to Larry. The basic issue is that the Copyright Act doesn't define distribution (not surprisingly - the world was different then).

What about disclaimer of warranty? The OSL and AFL warrants that the licensor has the right to grant you a license. This eliminates the "where did it come from?" problem that people worry about with OSS. This puts the risk back on the licensor, as they are warranting that they have the right to distribute. The license also states that any bringing of a patent claim (against the original work) by the licensee against the licensor or any other licensee will terminate the license (and thus the granted rights).