[License-discuss] BSD, MIT [was Re: Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.]

[Luis Villa]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 8:35 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Luis Villa scripsit:
>
>> Without getting into other issues, I'd hope we can agree that BSD/MIT
>> do not belong in a first-class list here in 2012. Apache fills the
>> same purpose[1] (permissive license) while being better drafted and
>> properly handling patents.
>
> All true, and I greatly favor Apache.  But BSD/MIT are well-understood
> and still extremely pervasive.

It's surely possible to be well-understood and extremely pervasive,
and still be a bad idea to recommend to anyone? (Or as in the current
page, imply that there is a good reason other than "historical
momentum" for its usage.)

Obviously, there is and always will be a large category of licenses
that boil down to "if you run across this in the wild, it is Open
Source," and BSD and MIT will always be a part of that.

But I think they should no longer be part of the category of licenses
labeled "if you were to start a new project from scratch, you should
probably use one of these" - which I think is what Karl is aiming at
here, and what our current page may well be read to imply even if not
changed.

Luis