[License-discuss] proposal to revise and slightly reorganize the OSI licensing pages

[Lawrence Rosen]

Luis Villa writes:
> The following Open Source licenses are popular, widely used, or 
> have strong communities:

As long as that list remains, I will object. It is inaccurate, incomplete,
misleading, subject to cronyism and personal bias by members of the OSI
board of directors, and does not reflect the actual importance or uses of
those licenses.  

Get rid of any indication that "popularity" [1] has anything to do with
legal viability. Define what you mean by "widely used" [2]. What is a
"strong community" [3]?

/Larry

[1] I've already pointed out that the Black Duck statistics on popularity
are in error!

[2] Do you mean lines of code? Number of software packages? And where's the
data to back up that list?

[3] Since when is the community for Open Solaris (CDDL) stronger than the
community for Magento or the US government software distributed under OSL
3.0, or the non-Apache software contributed to lots of projects under AFL
3.0, or the IETF software distributed under NOSL 3.0 (a license, by the way,
that has no equivalent)? Yes, I'm as biased as the members of the OSI board
when it comes to licenses, and I intend to be as loud a voice as you are as
long as you continue to propagate that nonsensical list.

/Larry

Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
Office: 707-485-1242


-----Original Message-----
From: Luis Villa [mailto:luis at tieguy.org] 
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 9:17 AM
To: License Discuss
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] proposal to revise and slightly reorganize
the OSI licensing pages

On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
>    The following Open Source licenses are popular, widely used, or 
> have strong communities:
>
>        Apache License, 2.0 (Apache-2.0)
>        BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license (BSD-3-Clause)
>        BSD 3-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" license (BSD-2-Clause)
>        GNU General Public License (GPL)
>        GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
>        MIT license (MIT)
>        Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0)
>        Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL-1.0)
>        Eclipse Public License (EPL-1.0)

Because there appears to have been some confusion, judging from private
emails, let me be explicit that this is exactly the same list currently
described as "License [sic] that are popular and widely used or with strong
communities." No changes, editorial or otherwise, have been made except to
change the category name into a complete sentence.

Do NOT suggest changes to this list at this time. It is not perfect, but it
is long-settled, and will not be revised until many months (more likely
years) of work have been done.

Luis
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