License Committee Report for August 2007

[Russ Nelson]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav writes:
 > You have had plenty of opportunity to notify me of any
 > discrepancy.

My apologies.  I simply didn't notice.

 > Am I to conclude that you are deliberately dragging your
 > feet over this license?

Well, in a sense, yes.  Back in the "bad old days" before we
established license-discuss, and the process was much less formal,
people just kinda asked "Hey, does this license comply", the entire
board looked at it, we scratched our heads and said "Yeah, sure, looks
like it to me."

Two things since then have caused us to (as you say it) deliberately
drag our feet.  First, was the APSL 1.0, which we later decided didn't
comply with the OSD, but which Apple quickly superceded by the APSL
1.1.  Second was the growing realization within the organization that
there were too many licenses with too few and too minor differences,
and too many licenses granted simply because it was as easy as asking.

So how to make licenses harder to get approved?  We quickly rejected
the idea of charging people money for approving licenses.  First,
because some of the most interesting licenses were going to come from
people like you without a monetary incentive for getting the license
approved.  Second, because we have to tread a fine line between
actually helping proprietary software users adopt open source, and
being seen as selling out to proprietary software users just because
they adopt some open source.

Instead, we've imposed requirements which reduce our workload in
analyzing licenses.

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