newsforge story

[sambc at nights.force9.co.uk]

I would like to pick up on a couple of points to 
this list, and to the OSI:

"Board member Russ Nelson says that people who 
are complaining should put forth more effort to 
help the board by fulfilling the purpose of the 
license-discuss list: to discuss the merits of 
submissions and offer suggestions to the 
board. "I submitted three licenses on 8/31 for 
review to the license-discuss mailing list. Has 
anybody reviewed them?" "

I never saw them - wether this is a fault at my 
end or yours remains to be seen. However, as it 
seems that others have looked in the archive and 
not found such emails I am puzzled. However, I 
must also reiterate by quoting my earlier 
suggestion (not credited to me in the article):

"Members briefly bandied about a suggestion to 
form volunteer focus groups for each pending 
license; but there was no official public 
response from the OSI to the license-discuss 
list, and it seemed that was what the list was 
waiting for."

I am still happy to do such things, and I am sure 
others are. A nice three tiered structure, with 
an hourglass shape (or diamond depending on how 
you drraw the diagram):

1) License-Discuss mailing list. Casual public 
discussion of pros and cons of licenses, and 
public opinion of their fitting the OSD

2) A set of smaller focus groups, handling one 
license at a time, and reviewing license-discuss 
feedback. Possibly with seperate mailing lists, 
and only 3-5 members. focus1 thru 
focus3 at opensource.org, for example. This would 
also allow the board and focus groups to suggest 
a small number of licenses for license-discuss to 
look at at one time.

3) The board, taking the reports of the focus 
groups. The focus groups will already have 
digested the views aired on license-discuss.

Now I am happy to do work implementing this and 
working with it once it is implemented. Can we 
have a reply from the board as to this 
possibility?

Finally, I would like to respond to the 
correspondace quoted in the article:

"So okay, my feeling is to write these folks off 
as whingers. My opinion is subject to change, but 
first I want to see some discussion about the 
submitted licenses." - Russ Nelson

Could this be clarified who it is applied to? No 
names need be mentioned, but what sort of 
proportion of the license-discuss list are we 
talking? A few real whingers? The whole list? 
Anyone who says anything negative? I would be 
itnerested to know, especially to figure out if 
it is likely that I am included, making 
contructive criticism as I have.


Sam Barnett-Cormack

>For those that haven't seen, NewsForge is carrying a none-to-flattering
>story of the discussion on this list these past couple of weeks:
>http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=3D01/09/04/1615251

--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3