Should the three new criteria be in the OSD?

[Alex Rousskov]

On Fri, 2005/03/04 (MST), <esr at snark.thyrsus.com> wrote:

> I also agree with the commenters who advocate a preferred category
> of licenses that we steer people towards -- Brian Behlendorf's "gold
> standard" list.  However, I do not believe that approach will makes these
> three criteria unnecessary.  Rather, I see these criteria serving as a
> necessary filter to weed out junk.  I think the "gold standard" should be
> *far* more strict than these criteria, and include at most a half-dozen
> licenses of established high quality.

If the Gold List has only a handful of licenses, we should not spend time  
on defining criteria. We should just pick a few basic use cases and then  
pick the best license or two for each case. A much more productive  
procedure than developing a sophisticated filter to end up with a few  
usual suspects as a result! For long-term maintenance, the question would  
not be "Is your license very good?" but:

	- What is your use case? Is it common? Is it already covered?
	- If not covered, let's debate how common it is.
	- If covered, let's debate whether the proposed license
         is better than what we currently recommend for that use case.

Alex.