Free Software Licenses not approved as Open Sourse License

[Wilson, Andrew]

Laura Majerus wrote:

> Recently, someone had asked whether interested parties who are not
> stewards of the license can submit licenses for approval by OSI and
the
> answer at the time was "no."  OSI only approves licenses that are
> submitted for approval by their stewards.  

We should have this discussion sooner or later, so let's try sooner.
As everyone knows, FSF is in the process of revising GPL and LGPL.
Also, everyone knows Richard Stallman's opinion of "open source"
versus "free software."  I wouldn't dream of presuming to speak
for Richard and the FSF, but I would be very surprised if they
were to submit GPL/LGPL 3.0 to OSI for approval as "open source."

If this assumption is correct, and if OSI strictly enforces the
stewards-only policy Laura describes, that creates a highly awkward 
situation where two of the most important licenses 
wouldn't even be evaluated.

Seemingly, something needs to give.

Andy Wilson
Intel Open Source Technology Center