Should the three new criteria be in the OSD?

Eric S. Raymond esr at thyrsus.com
Fri Mar 4 15:25:35 UTC 2005


Andy Tai <lichengtai at yahoo.com>:
> What are these existing bad licenses?

One of them is the original Artistic License.  Awful, vague, poorly drafted.
*Deliberately* vague, by the way -- Larry Wall once told me that was a
tactical choice, made back in the 1980s when the IPR legal environment 
was very different.  I believe he now regrets it.

If we develop a "deprecated" list (which is possible, but not yet
decided) I predict the Artistic License will go on it so fast your
head will spin.

Besides being a good move on the merits, by the way, being able to
"sacrifice" one high-profile hacker license would help the corporations
swallow the deprecation of at least a few crappy corporate vanity licenses.
Personally (not speaking for OSI) I could name half a dozen I'd like
to shitcan.  But I won't.  Yet.

My intention is that the people who have been putting heavy pressure
on OSI to solve the proliferation problem are going to get what they
want, and they're going to get it good and hard.

(Again, this is hypothetical.  A "deprecated" list is not a present plan,
only a future possibility.")
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>



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