Get ready....

[Derek J. Balling]

>In spirit, perhaps I do.  However, I don't think that it is very sound
>law practice to review license documents using ``diff'' :-)

Agreed. :)  But its the fastest method of describing what I'm talking about
-- looking for the differences between parent and child license.

>My thought was that if OSI had these two boiler plate licenses, then
>organizations could start from one of them.  Just using one as the
>base document would not mean that the derived document would
>automatically earn an Open Source Certification mark.  However, it
>would certainly make it easier for OSI to determine whether a license
>meets the requirements of an Open Source Certification mark.

Also agreed. Altering the OSI license does NOT grant you OS Certification
by any stretch. It may get you there faster, because much of the wording is
"known and acceptable", but if you add a clause saying "and if you want to
alter the code, you have to sacrifice a virgin on halloween to us", then
obviously, you lose. :)

>In other words, having good starting licenses (which should be
>complete in their own right, as is the GPL) will encourage
>organizations to adopt them because:
>1. It is less trouble and less confusing than reviewing the large
>   number of ``Open Source'' licenses of today: GPL, BSD, X, Apache,
>   Artistic, NPL, MPL, APSL, IBM's Jikes license, et. al.
>2. Because adopting one of these licenses makes it easier to get
>   the Open Source Certification mark (as the licenses would be
>   familiar to OSI).

Actually, I would say that if you take (for lack of better terms here don't
fight me on terms) the OSI-GPL, or the OSI-BSD, or the OSI-Artistic
license, and you use it verbatim, and add nothing that alters that license
at all (no additional clauses in other licenses, etc.) then "bang" you're
certified. If OSI wrote your license for you, you should not have to
"request" certification. Maybe as a process for getting on a list or
something, but not on a permissive basis.

>The OSC is crucial.  One should not be able to modify an Open Source
>(cm) license, and claim that the derivative is Open Source (cm).

Agreed.

D