License Proliferation Dissatisfaction

[Lawrence Rosen]

Russ Nelson wrote:
> We respected the communities that have grown up around
> these licenses.  We looked at the number of people and projects using
> a license, and gave them credit for popularity in spite of the
> relative legal merit of the license.

The committee process was blatantly political and whatever attempts were
made by the committee to determine popularity were clearly as
methodologically unsound as was its legal analysis. 

What is the popularity or size of the community around CDDL? Or was it
merely necessary to keep the representatives of Sun happy on your committee?
Long before CDDL became a license, as of 1/7/05 when I wrote a paper for
distribution on the OSDL website on the topic of license proliferation,
OSL/AFL were respectively #11 and #14 on the Sourceforge.net site. Treated
as a single license (which in principle they are except for one provision),
it would have been #8, ahead of the CPL (which magically remains "popular"
on your list to keep IBM happy). I haven't run the statistics since; did
your committee? 

I'm not trying to disparage CDDL or CPL here. I'm just punching holes in
Russ' nonsense.

And regardless of statistics, when did OSI start to run fashion shows
instead of open source education? Remember, I wrote the bylaws and know what
OSI's mission was supposed to be. "Ranking for popularity" was never a part
of it. 

/Larry