Change ot topic, back to OVPL

[Joel West]

On 11:16 AM -0700 8/24/05, Brian Behlendorf doth scribe:
>On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Russell Nelson wrote:
>>Do any license-discuss readers disagree with me?
>
>I disagree with requirements for certification that go beyond conformance to the letter and spirit of OSD.  Alex is right - you didn't make Sun go get the MPL fixed.  All this effort being poured into denying the OVPL certification would be better invested elsewhere, such as in license comparison documents, or the license selection wizards people have proposed or prototyped, or in culling dead licenses.  IMHO.

The new, improved OSI seems to be toeing the Martin Fink line that all the Open Source world's problems can be solved by a licensing freeze or rollback, rather than the previously announced plan to tier licenses into three groups. Since the 3rd tier group is called "not recommended", it appears that under the new policy that licenses likely to emerge in this group will be killed in the womb rather than brought into the world to fight for acceptance.

Brian is not the only one who has doubts about the current anti-proliferation regime. Simon Phipps of Sun (now open source czar at Sun) made some cogent comments a few months back...

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=failed_as_in_succeeded_wildly

So if the OSI is going to have a de facto freeze on new licenses that otherwise meet the spirit of the OSD, in the name of transparency this should be announced as an official policy.

On 8:38 PM -0700 8/22/05, Lawrence Rosen doth scribe:
>Nobody has ever been silenced from license-discuss. Call it a "committee of
>the whole" and let's get on with important topics.

Except that the real committee is free to ignore consensus of the committee of the whole, which makes it more of a debating society.

Joel