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

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Just chiming in... I am also 1000% behind this.  Looks like a great move
forward.

Karl Fogel <kfogel at red-bean.com> writes:

> I completely support this, and am very happy to have it supersede my
> original proposed new page -- this way is better, both in the short term
> and the long term.  Thanks for the well-explained proposal, Luis.
>
> I especially like the second item under Miscellany, by the way :-).
> That will make maintenance of the list much easier, and I think it is
> something Infrastructure should look at after the Drupal upgrade.
>
> Terse only because in an airport waiting lounge,
> -Karl
>
> Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> writes:
>>Following up on Karl's email of a few months ago, this is a
>>deliberately low-key proposal from me and other board members to
>>simplify and improve how the OSI-approved licenses are presented on
>>the OSI website. As it currently stands, we don't have a page we can
>>point a newcomer to to learn about what an open source license is, or
>>what the most common licenses are. We'd like to solve that, at least
>>in part, by making the current http://opensource.org/licenses/ more
>>useful by highlighting the most common licenses and by providing a bit
>>more context about what it means to be an open source license.
>>
>>Despite coming from me and other board members, the text and layout
>>below are just a proposal, and are of course open to suggestions,
>>improvements, and discussion.
>>
>>What This Is Not
>>============
>>
>>Karl's original proposal included suggestions of how to change and
>>update which licenses belong in which categories. This email and
>>proposed web site changes are definitely not addressing that issue. I
>>feel (and I'm pretty sure others on the board feel) that those
>>questions should be addressed, but because those are complex issues
>>that will inevitably involve months of careful discussion and
>>planning, and because we all agree that the current website layout is
>>unsatisfactory, we'd like to not block this quicker, smaller
>>discussion.
>>
>>The Proposal
>>=========
>>
>>1. Reorganize the left-side navigation. What is currently "Open Source
>>Licenses," with sub-points "Licenses by Category", "Licenses by Name",
>>"License Review Process," and "License Proliferation," would simply
>>become "Open Source Licensing" (content of that page discussed below).
>>"License Review Process" and "License Proliferation" would be moved to
>>bullets under "The Open Source Definition," because those pages are
>>primarily about OSI's process and standards rather than about specific
>>licenses or about open source licenses more generally.
>>
>>By slightly hiding the "by category" and "by names" pages, we'd be
>>funneling people (particularly newcomers) to a slightly more
>>informative page (and one that can be improved over time), while not
>>losing the master lists altogether for the times when those are
>>needed.
>>
>>2. The "Open Source Licensing" page (replacing
>>http://opensource.org/licenses/)  would be fleshed out to say
>>(hopefully all changes self-explanatory):
>>
>>    Open Source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source
>>Definition and have been approved through the Open Source Initiative's
>>license review process.
>>
>>    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)
>>
>>    A complete list of all Open Source Initiative-approved licenses,
>>including those above, is available:
>>
>>        sorted by name (alphabetical)
>>        sorted by category
>>
>>    For more information about Open Source licenses and in particular
>>about the Open Source Initiative's license review process, see:
>>
>>        The Open Source Definition (annotated version)
>>        The OSI License Review Process
>>        Information on License Proliferation and the 2006 License
>>Proliferation Report
>>
>>Miscellany
>>========
>>
>>* We'll of course clean up any dangling links caused by changed URLs
>>and set up proper redirects before changing any URLs. (Not entirely
>>clear it makes sense to change /licenses/ to /licensing/, which would
>>be the primary URL change based on the previous suggestions).
>>
>>* In the longer term, once Drupal is upgraded, it will likely make
>>sense to generate http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and
>>http://opensource.org/licenses/category programatically, rather than
>>through the current manual listing, which is of course error-prone.
>>(Some people have suggested doing away with the alphabetical list
>>altogether, which I personally would be fine with.) That may cause
>>some more tweaks in URLs and layouts, but we'll cross that bridge when
>>we come to it.
>>_______________________________________________
>>License-discuss mailing list
>>License-discuss at opensource.org
>>http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
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