[License-discuss] Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.

[Karl Fogel]

"Mike Milinkovich" <mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org> writes:
>So this is basically re-opening up the whole can of worms that the license
>proliferation committee struggled with some years back that led them to
>create the category "License that are popular and widely used or with strong
>communities". Notably missing from your list are the "weak copyleft"
>licenses that are backed by large communities such as Mozilla and Eclipse. 

The question is, do (or should) projects unassociated with those
organizations still use those licenses?

For Apache 2.0, the answer is clearly "yes".  If it's also "yes" for Moz
and/or Eclipse, then we should probably make a judgement call and put
one or both in that first group.  

Like I said, this is a first pass.  The whole point of the post is to
get comments like yours.

I think this is not quite the same problem as the license proliferation
committee tackled previously.  I'm not thinking of this as a license
proliferation problem per se, anyway, but rather a "What would be most
helpful for a newcomer to the site?" problem.

>I am certainly not happy with the idea that the only license of that
>category which would be implicitly recommended by the OSI is the LGPL. The
>LGPL is not a desirable license for many (primarily commercial) adopters of
>open source, and in fact neither the Eclipse or Apache communities will
>allow it for dependencies.

*nod*

Apache won't allow LGPL for deps?  I hadn't heard that; I'm pretty sure
I've seen LGPL'd deps in not just Apache-licensed projects, but in
projects that are actually formally part of the ASF.  Not enough time to
do the primary source research on that right now, as I'm about to head
into a meeting, but I wanted to at least note that it sounded odd to
me...

Thanks,
-K