OSI's war on corporate licenses

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Joel West (svosrp at gmail.com):

[...]

> But it seems the OSI board has gone far beyond license proliferation,
> to actively discourage firm-sponsored OSS licenses of any kind.

Oh dear!  You seem to be leaping to some melodramatic and fatuous
biz-speak conclusions plainly not supported by the OSI announcement text
under discussion.  How unfortunate.

> But how does this lead to the conclusion that firm-sponsored OSS
> licenses or projects are a failure? There's a logical leap that's been
> left out.

Perhaps you would be less perplexed if you hadn't somehow missed the key
word "asymmetrical" in the sentence you just quoted.  But wait:

> Or is this just an attack on asymmetric open source business models? 

Oh, you _didn't_ miss that word, after all!  But how can a desire to
desire to no longer approve (new) licences with asymmetical rights
reservations be an "attack" on a "business model"?

> And if we're going to attack asymmetric models, why the MPL/CPL/CDDL?
> Why not attack the dual license GPL model? 

I see no asymmetric rights reservations, there.  Perhaps they're in some
disused corner of those licences, unknown in previous licensing
discussions?  Pray elucidate, sir.

> We are just beginning to see a huge experimentation in open source
> business models. It's hard to see how OSI or the open source movement
> are helped if those involving dual license get to call themselves
> "open source" but those involving the CPL do not.

You would presumably be less perplexed if you hadn't missed the words
"From now on" in the OSI announcement.

-- 
Cheers,                           "This is Unix.  Stop acting so helpless."
Rick Moen                                               -- D.J. Bernstein
rick at linuxmafia.com