BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process

[Chris Travers]

On 10/17/07, Ben Tilly <btilly at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not so fast.
>
> IANAL either, but it seems to me that if the copyright holder says,
> "My license is open source because it grants sufficient permissions to
> allow it to be relicensed as X", that statement itself is sufficient
> permission to allow someone to distribute under the terms of X.
> Therefore the software is now implicitly licensed as X and is
> effectively an open source license.

I don't disagree with you on that point.  However, this does not
invalidate what I am saying.  We can argue what "relicense" means in
this context and whether this is permitted in the MIT License or BSD
LIcense but that is an entirely separate issue.

The  problem that we all see is that there are a *lot* of existing
permissive licenses out there.   These are not generally new licenses,
but we can probably agree that there are thousands of licenses out
there when we are talking about minor wording variations, and that
many of these probably predate the OSI.

The issue is that I don't believe that the OSI can *ever* put pressure
on vendors to adopt only OSI licenses as open source (for example the
complaints about Microsoft publicly labling one of the two licenses
they submitted as open source prior to approval by the OSI) and at the
same time refuse to approve new licenses on the basis of license
proliferation concerns.  If permissive licenses are denied on this
basis, what happens with CentriCRM?  What about people caling the
"Microsoft Reference License" as "a hobbled open source license?"
(Note:  That quote was *not* made by Microsoft but rather by a web
site catering to the open source community.)  What about LWN labeling
Qmail as "open source?" (Granted, if DJB explicitly allowed the
distribution of patches, it would be, but it is missing this
requirement.)

This sort of erosion is what I am talking about.  As long as
PostgreSQL, BIND, etc. use unapproved licenses, everyone else can
point to them and say "we don't have to listen to you about approved
licenses."

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers