Suggestion for OSI website (was: Newly approved licenses)

[phil hunt]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Lawrence E. Rosen wrote:
> I am pleased to report that a majority of the OSI board has voted to approve
> the following open source licenses:
> 
> Common Public License:
> http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/license-cpl.html
> 
> APSL 1.2:
> http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/
> 
> These licenses will be posted to the OSI website's approved license list as
> soon as possible.

I think it would be a nice idea if the OSI webpage that contained a list
of open soure licenses, instead of simply listing them, contained a
paragraph or two about each one's properties.

For example, it could say that the GPL and QPL are both strong copyleft
licenses, with the peculiarity in the GPL's case that to link to it, you
have to license your code under the GPL (the QPL allows any open source
license). The QPL has the peculiarity that changes must be released as
patches.

Similarly the LGPL and MPL are both weak copyleft licenses, with
[blah blah blah]... you get the idea.


-- 
***** Phil Hunt *****