[License-discuss] Alternative Proposal: The OSI licensing pages

[Henrik Ingo]

Larry, I think the text below is a constructive proposal. I understand
(and to me that's perfectly fine) that Luis does not intend to change
the short list of popular licenses at this time, yet when that is up
for discussion I think the below is one good route out of this.

In terms of usability it's unfortunate that the FSF, Black Duck etc do
not link back to the opensource.org pages for each license, so it is
still worthwile if we can agree on a list of our own that would do
exactly that. (Of course, we might not agree, but there's a point in
trying...)

I just wanted to throw in another thought for when that day comes. A
current issue for me is not so much picking one good license for my
own project, rather let's say I develop software for some use case
(for me web and SaaS software) and I'd like a lawyer to pre-approve a
list of licenses out of which I can freely consume FOSS software for
that use case. Now it is in my interest to get a list that looks
short, yet covers as much FOSS software as possible.

Of course, I can use resources like Black Duck to get such a list, but
if it would be possible for OSI to agree on and host a page which
starts with the sentence: "Based on studies [footnote1, footnote2...]
we believe that more than 90% of open source software ever published
uses one of the following licenses:"

Then it would of course start with GPLv2, the other GPLs, Apache, BSD,
MIT, Mozilla, Eclipse etc...

My point is that to me it doesn't really matter whether those are
considered good or bad licenses (my lawyer will then reject any he
doesn't like), I just like to know which licenses are used a lot.

henrik


On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> Karl Fogel wrote:
>
> As has been explained multiple times, Luis's current proposal is
> intentionally based on something that was determined a long time ago, and he
> is doing it this way in order to be able to take one small step now -- and
> not have it bottlenecked by the larger & more complex discussion that needs
> to happen to update that list.  I think Mike has pointed this out too.
>
>
>
> LER recommends that this is what the OSI landing page ought to say:
>
>
>
> ************
>
>
>
> An alphabetical listing of all Currently Approved open source licenses is
> shown here. <link>
>
>
>
> The Currently Approved list excludes those licenses that have been replaced
> with more recent versions (in which case the most recent version has been
> listed above), or that have been deprecated by their original authors. A
> list of Replaced and Deprecated licenses can be found here. <link>
>
>
>
> Several organizations maintain lists of licenses that they prefer to be used
> for contributions or that they recommend for their community participants.
> Among these Preferred lists are the following:
>
>
>
> ·        Free Software Foundation (FSF) <link>
>
> ·        OSI License Proliferation Committee Report <link> [to be updated
> someday?]
>
> ·        Apache Software Foundation <link>
>
> ·        Eclipse Foundations <link>
>
> ·        Google/Android <link>
>
> ·        Mozilla Foundation <link>
>
> ·        Linux Foundation <link>
>
> ·        Open Solaris <link>
>
> ·        Etc.
>
>
>
> Various organizations identify Popular open source licenses based on surveys
> and other criteria. These lists are available on their websites:
>
>
>
> ·        Black Duck Software <link>
>
> ·        Etc.
>
>
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>



-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
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