restarting License (anti-)Proliferation

[Russ Nelson]

We have a committee to do this work.  Pick just ONE address, please
and thanks.

Scott Shattuck writes:
 > Personally I think these ideas lead to a very slippery slope. It's one  
 > thing to announce that upon further review a particular license  
 > doesn't actually comply with the OSI definition. It's entirely another  
 > to say one is preferred and another is deprecated. The former is a  
 > clear responsibility of the OSI as the arbiter of what constitutes  
 > compliance. The latter begins to step into a realm where the OSI can  
 > be affecting business outcomes by passing quality judgements on  
 > licenses in the absence of sufficient detail. Stating that a license  
 > is "preferred" or "deprecated" is a fitness-of-purpose judgment in  
 > some sense -- one which can't be made without taking into  
 > consideration the goals of the licensor, licensee, and the various  
 > specifics of the licensed software, the nature of the consuming  
 > application and subsequent distribution requirements. In my mind  
 > attempting to place a broadly sweeping value judgement on a license in  
 > the absence of such information is a fools errand.
 > 
 > What I believe might be useful would be to publish "commentaries"  
 > which describe what the community considers to the be pros and cons of  
 > a particular license with respect to a set of common licensing  
 > scenarios. This information would then allow both licensors and  
 > licensees to get perhaps a clearer view of the tradeoffs each license  
 > choice embodies. This is the kind of information the software  
 > community needs -- not labels which can't really assist in making  
 > informed licensing decisions.
 > 
 > ss
 > 
 > 
 > On Aug 5, 2008, at 9:06 AM, Smith, McCoy wrote:
 > 
 > > At the risk of proliferating categories, shouldn't there be a category
 > > (or perhaps a subcategory within "compliant") for "retired" or
 > > "deprecated" licenses?  Those to me seem like they should be of an  
 > > even
 > > lesser status than the "compliant" ones.
 > > McCoy
 > >
 > > -----Original Message-----
 > > From: Russ Nelson [mailto:nelson at crynwr.com]
 > > Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 7:00 AM
 > > To: license-proliferation at opensource.org;
 > > license-proliferation-discuss at opensource.org;
 > > license-proliferation-2 at opensource.org
 > > Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org; osi at opensource.org
 > > Subject: restarting License (anti-)Proliferation
 > >
 > > [ Note the Reply-To.  Please join the new list to do the work of the
 > > committee, or if you want to discuss the committee, do it on
 > > license-discuss.  -russ ]
 > >
 > > [ I also want to call out explicitly Larry Rosen, Bruce Perens, Chris
 > > Dibona, and Van Lindberg as people who have expressed a strong opinion
 > > on the subject of license proliferation.  Apologies to anyone whom
 > > I've left out. -russ ]
 > >
 > > I got a motion through the OSI board to restart the License
 > > (anti-)Proliferation committee.  Here's the text of the motion:
 > >
 > >    Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to
 > >    evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers - an upper tier and
 > >    a lower tier of licenses (e.g. "recommended" and "compliant"). The
 > >    role of this committee would be to establish criteria for
 > >    assigning the tier for each license, use a new
 > >    license-proliferation mailing list for discussion and come up with
 > >    a final list of two tiers of licenses. Mr. Nelson will be chairing
 > >    this new committee. The Board will select the two terms that are
 > >    used. The deadline for presenting the draft recommendations from
 > >    the committee back to the board will be October 2008. Ms. Cooper
 > >    calls the vote, Mr. Tiemann seconds and the motion is passed
 > >    unanimously.
 > >
 > > You may ask "aren't we doing a rewind?"  No.  Here's why:
 > >
 > >  o We asked the previous committee to do the wrong thing, at which
 > >    they proceeded to do a good job, but which was still wrong.
 > >    Ask a wrong question and you get a wrong answer every time.
 > >  o This committee is standing; the previous was ad-hoc.
 > >  o This is going to be a public process, unlike the previous effort.
 > >  o This committee will create a process to categorize the licenses;
 > >    The previous committee categorized the licenses.
 > >
 > > Here's the problem statement:
 > >
 > >    The problem of license proliferation has two countervailing
 > >    aspects.  Too many approved licenses increases the cost of using
 > >    Open Source because of the quantity of licenses that must be
 > >    understood.  Each one fragments the community and reduces code
 > >    sharing between projects.  On the other hand, too few approved
 > >    licenses means that others will claim "but our software's license
 > >    complies with the OSD; read it for yourself" which weakens the
 > >    brand name.
 > >
 > >    The trouble is that we have only one flavor of cookie to hand out
 > >    (a single "OSI Approved" trademark).  With two flavours, we can
 > >    give one to all licenses which comply with the OSD, and the other
 > >    one to all licenses which we recommend to reduce licensing costs.
 > >    But how to make this distinction?  How do we do it without
 > >    alienating somebody because their favorite license didn't make the
 > >    list?  How do we do it so that new licenses, which start off as
 > >    merely Compliant and not Recommended, can get promoted?  How do we
 > >    de-Recommend some licenses, such as the Artistic 1.0 (currently on
 > >    the losing end of a legal battle)?
 > >
 > >    Answering these questions is the work of the committee.
 > >
 > >    I suggest that this committee should come up with a published
 > >    criteria which anyone can apply against the licenses to decide
 > >    which ones we recommend.  It should be a process for which anyone
 > >    can understand the rationale.  Yet, it will likely need tweaking,
 > >    thus a standing committee. We have laws because human judgement
 > >    isn't fair enough, but we have judges because laws are never fair
 > >    enough.
 > >
 > >    Once the committee is satisfied with its work, it will present its
 > >    results to the Open Source Initiative for approval as policy.  The
 > >    board has requested that this be accomplished by the October board
 > >    meeting (2nd Wednesday).  I'm the chair of the committee.
 > >    Membership of the committee is open to all, although disruptive
 > >    members will be invited to comment on license-discuss instead.
 > >
 > >    Join the committee by sending any piece of email to
 > >    license-proliferation-2-subscribe at opensource.org.  You will
 > >    receive a subscription confirmation.  Reply to it.
 > >
 > >    Please start the discussion by reviewing the work of the ad-hoc
 > >    committee:   http://www.opensource.org/proliferation
 > >
 > > -- 
 > > --my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com   | Software that needs
 > > Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok | documentation is
 > > software
 > > 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-323-1241       | that needs repair.
 > > Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  |     Sheepdog          |
 >