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

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

On Jun 4, 2012, at 9:36 AM, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> 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.  

Ah, Larry-- you can take a lawyer out of the courtroom, but evidently one
cannot take the legalese out of what a lawyer says.  :-)

There is no judge here to object to; there's only the OSI community.

> 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!

This might be true; is there better data available which we can use to compare?
Otherwise, I'd start by looking at SourceForge, github, and so forth to get a rough idea.

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

Let's say that Luis provided some data in response.  Would you accept that,
or would you continue to debate the matter until your favorite licenses appear?

> [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)?

Since always, frankly.  I've never even heard of Magento, but all of the
platforms I use with the possible exception of MS Windows include CDDL
software like DTrace or ZFS at the kernel level.

I know that even Windows is using Sun RPC [1], although that was not under the CDDL
when RPC, NFS and such was being proposed as community standards via RFC process [2].

> 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.

The main license I see missing from the list is zlib; again, I don't think I can
find a single platform around which doesn't use zlib.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck

PS: The acronyms are nearly overloaded:
[1] RPC = "Remote Procedure Call"; [2] RPC = "Request for Comments".