For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Matthew Flaschen (matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu):

> I'm talking about what they use, not what they're supposed to use.  I
> can give many examples of times OSI has been reluctant to approve an
> OSD-compliant license.  For instance, they held off on SimPL because it
> was (mistakenly) believed incompatible with GPLv2.

I imagine Board members regard it as perfectly appropriate to delay
consideration of a licence where Board members wish to encourage the
drafter to consider some change, or to ponder some practial problem or
badly written wording.  Let's face it:  Many new licences have been 
pretty dumb ideas in a variety of ways, and are likely to remain so
(human perversity, and in particular the perversity of many licence 
drafters, being what it is).  Were I on the Board, I'd probably be in
absolutely no hurry to vote on those, either -- and would regard that 
fact as in no way contradictory of the process shown on
http://www.opensource.org/approval .

And, were I on the Board, I would not _say_ in public -- when I hear
someone here proclaim that http://www.opensource.org/approval isn't the
full story and fails to disclose the Board's desire to talk to you about
your odd proposal -- the phrase "Go away, little boy" -- but I would
think it.  ;->

(I should hasten to make clear that I do _not_ speak for OSI.)