License Committee Report for August 2007

[Russ Nelson]

I'm the chair of the license approval committee.  This is my report
from the board back to the committee.


Title: Open Source Hardware License 
Status: The board encourages more discussion, as Open Source Hardware
falls within the remit of the Open Source Initiative.

Title: GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3)
Title: Lesser GNU General Public License v3 (LGPLv3)
Status: The Open Source Initiative is pleased to announce that, based
on broad review and acceptance by both the Board and the community, it
has confirmed that GPLv3 and LGPLv3 both conform to the Open Source
Definition. Note that new licenses containing "further restrictions"
allowed by GPLv3 and LGPLv3 may not be conformant with the OSD, and
thus will still require separate review and approval. Due to the
dramatic differences between and viable communities around both the
GPLv3 family and the GPLv2 family of licenses, we will not be marking
GPLv2 and LGPLv2 as redundant, even thought they are technically
superseded respectively by GPLv3 and LGPLv3.

Title: Simple Public License (SimPL):
Status: The board wants to know what the plan is with respect to the
GPLv3.  In the interest of preserving as much compatibility between
licenses, it would be nice if the SimPL allowed promotion to either
the GPLv2 or GPLv3.

Title: Non-Profit OSL 3.0
Status: Passed Unanimously.

Title: Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
Status: Still under discussion

Title: Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL)
Status: Still under discussion

Title: Simplified BSD License
Status: Lost in process

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