BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

As long as the licenses are permissive and compatible then license proliferation should have little impact on code reuse.
 
The only time I've seen issues with code reuse in the open source world (for license reasons anyway) is when a permissively licensed project notices some code from a copyleft licensed project and goes "Huh...that would have been nice to reuse...I guess I need to go reinvent the wheel".
 
>From the perspective of lots of permissive variants, which already exist but are not OSI approved, it would be nice to have the assurance that a license really IS a permissive variant and not something else.
 
That does imply that the OSI would still need to do careful vetting of license variant submissions but in the end it shouldn't really increase proliferation in terms of use because most folks are going to use the top level license that best fits their needs.  Not some strange/outdated variant X unless compelled to for other reasons.
 
Nigel

________________________________

From: Matthew Flaschen [mailto:matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu]
Sent: Tue 10/16/2007 6:52 PM
To: License Discuss
Subject: Re: BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process



Chris Travers wrote:
>>Encouraging projects to change to an approved license is a useful
>>way of reducing license proliferation.

> I don't think that point is going to go anywhere.

You're missing the point.  It already has.  Project developers /already/
look to OSI when they choose a license.  OSI wants to limit the number
of items they choose from.  The more licenses that are
approved/certified/etc. the more they have to choose from.  This results
in more license proliferation, and less code reuse.
> I personally do not htink that the OSI can at once try to equate lack of
> approval with a lack of being open soruce and at the same time tackle
> the license prolieration question as you have described.  These are mutually exclusive goals and at best we can only
> seek balance.

OSI officially saying unapproved license are "Open
Source/OSI-Certified/OSI Class X" will not help license proliferation.
It will be easier to get a new license certified...so there will be more
new licenses.

Matt Flaschen


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