License Committee Report for September 2008

[Wilson, Andrew]

Lawrence Rosen wrote: 

> 2. Creating a new license that is LGPL plus something else is a new
license.
> The wxWindows license stands on its own and would need to be approved
on its
> own. You tell me that it was. Anything wrong with that, other than
that it
> fosters license proliferation in order to get rid of a perceived LGPL
"bug"?

Exactly as you point out, requiring a separate OSI approval for each
combo of
a base OSD-compliant license plus additional permissions
is a recipe for license proliferation.  If OSI were to templatize its
approach and say any combination of an OSD-compliant license plus
additional
permissions -- so long as those permissions may electively
be removed by licensees -- is still OSD compliant, our ever-growing 
list of licenses would be down 
by at least one, because wxWindows would clearly fit the template
and would not need its own approval.

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center