OSI approval of Plan 9 license

[Ralph Mellor]

> > Given that I'm just a member of the public, and
> > not the owner of the license, can I do that? If I
> > can, are all relevant parties happy for me to do so?
> 
> I don't see why you can't.

OK. [1]


>  But of course if OSI rejects it, there's nothing you can do
> to make Lucent change

That's fine. OSI rejections are a very useful service to the
community, just as useful as approvals.


> which means OSI will probably not treat this as a
> high-priority item

Perhaps. But if so, I think they should reconsider.

The current situation is that the Plan 9 license happily
proclaims itself "Open Source" in its title. I realize that
the OSI formulated the "Certified" trademark as the
primary response to that sort of situation, but I think
there is a powerful secondary strategy, namely to
force selected licenses that attempt this dilution of
the precise meaning of the term "open source" through
the approval process. It's not so important to do so if a
license is an out-and-out lie -- the community will soon
get the picture if a license that claims to be open source
is nothing of the sort. But the Plan 9 case is different. It
radically dilutes the power of the term "open source"
precisely because it is borderline.

If nothing else, I am unhappy that I have had to spend
hours trying to determine if the Plan 9 license is going
to work for me. I look to the OSI to help reduce this
overhead of investigating individual licenses.


> especially if (as I suspect) they are going to reject it
> as written.

Afaict, in all cases where an issue was raised as being
unequivocally a problem with the Plan 9 license, the
license language was changed in a way that seems to
be a good faith and potentially acceptable way to address
the issue raised. (With the exception of removing use of
the term "open source". But that arguably is because the
intent was that the license was in fact "open source".)

I have not seen discussion of the new language.

That's also part of my point; it appears that the process
stalled right when the license was plausibly ready to be
accepted, which is at least odd.


> OSI's business is to certify OS licenses and to evolve
> non-compliant licenses toward compliance, not to put
> black flags on unchangeable non-OSI licenses.

That's part of their business. And that business was
begun in the case of the Plan 9 license, but not taken
through to completion.

Also, I think it's OSI's responsibility to create clarity
about what "open source" means and that means
that rejections are at least as important as approvals.


--
ralph


[1]
I just realized that there is no copyright on the Plan 9
license, rendering the owner the public, which means
the language in the approval process about being the
license owner is moot. Ok, got that out the way.


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