Change ot topic, back to OVPL

[Russell Nelson]

Joel West writes:
 > 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.

You're mixing issues here.  There are two questions with different
answers:
  1) what do we do about existing licenses?  
  2) what do we do about approving new licenses?

The OSI board has already spoken on these two problems:
  1) It has established a committee to advise it on this issue.
     The committee is currently presuming that the best way to address
     the problem is to tier the licenses.  That's a tactic, not a
     strategy and may change with further information.
  2) It has voted into place three new criteria for license approval.

 > Except that the real committee is free to ignore consensus of the
 > committee of the whole,

Am I?  The real committee has only one job: report the consensus of
the committee of the whole.  If it fails to do that, it has utterly
failed.  If you're suggesting that the board can then do whatever the
hell it wants, then sure, it can, and people are free to ignore it.
"OSI Certified" only has value if people trust it.  If we screw up,
people won't trust it and we'll have wasted our time.  I don't believe
in wasting my time.

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