BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process

[John Cowan]

Zac Bowling scripsit:

> I'm just really annoyed because the license approval process is being
> abused lately with tons of submitions of really trivial variations of
> the same permissive licenses that are already approved by the OSI. I
> don't want to offend anyone that may of submitted a license because of
> the license submittions may have been legit.

However, these licenses are actually in real use.  Currently, the PostgreSQL
folks and their downstream users can't say their code is OSI Certified, and
will get called baaaad if they say it's Open Source.  The only way around
that is to change the license (apparently hard) or get it approved
(which is what this list is for).  Yes, the differences are trivial, but
similarly trivial changes can make the difference between OSS and non-OSS,
so we do have to make the decisions.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark
The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark
But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat
One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.