Bruce Perens rejected from license-proliferation committee.

Chuck Swiger chuck at codefab.com
Sun Aug 21 18:29:11 UTC 2005


Bruce Perens wrote:
[ ... ]
> Some time ago, I applied to be on the license proliferation committee. I
> eventually got a form letter from Laura Majerus saying that they had too
> many qualified people. When addressed through Mike Tiemann, Laura simply
> repeated her previous mantra.

Perhaps you're overqualified?  :-)

> Most of you will realize that I am uniquely qualified as the main author
> of the guidelines that OSI now seeks to interpret, and someone who has
> assisted many businesses and legal professionals in working within those
> guidlines since then. Two people with experience similar to mine but
> less in duration were admitted to the committee. There are a few legal
> professionals admitted. All others admitted are extremely worthy
> individuals, and have been working very hard at this, but I can't really
> say they are more experienced.
[ ... ]
> And thus, I really have to question the process.

Agreed.  No doubt the current license-proliferation committee is full of 
relatively smart and capable people who ought to be capable of making positive 
contributions to almost any topic, at least in theory.  In practice, the number 
of people who actually do make substantial and well-known contributions to Open 
Source is smaller.

If it's not clear to the OSI that Bruce is likely to improve the committee's 
relevance and ability to produce useful results, I start to wonder whether the 
license-proliferation committee is trying to solve the right problem?

-- 
-Chuck

PS: Look on the bright side, Bruce: now you're guaranteed to be qualified for 
the license-anti-proliferation committee I proposed, way back when.  :-)

I'm willing to nominate both you and Martin Fink, at least if the latter isn't 
too busy giving keynotes at LinuxWorld to take some time to try and actually 
solve the problem he's talking about....



More information about the License-discuss mailing list