[License-discuss] license committee

[Smith, McCoy]

FWIW, the report from the committee (which formed in ’04 but didn’t issue a report until ’06) was published here:  http://www.opensource.org/proliferation
AFAIK, that report didn’t result in a significant amount of voluntary deprecation of licenses (at the time, there were only 4 OSI-approved licenses that had been deprecated;  I don’t think many others have since).
I also don’t know if that report had some influence on stemming the tide of new licenses submitted for OSI-approval, but it seems as though fewer have been added to the list since 2006.  Those who have kept closer tabs on the pace of license submission (or voluntary deprecations) might be able to shed more light on both of those issues.
I’m pretty sure there was some degree of dissatisfaction with the output of the ’04 committee and I thought there was going to be a new committee set up to reconsider the output, but perhaps that never happened.
Sorry for the top-posting for those of you who find that confusing.


From: license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org [mailto:license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Perens
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 9:06 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: [License-discuss] license committee

If I'm not mistaken, this committee met in 2004? "Time to do it right" would be about doing it over. Did I miss some announcement?

On 03/09/2012 08:55 AM, John Cowan wrote:

Karl Fogel scripsit:



If you want an organization that recommends licenses, the FSF is happy

to help. I agree that OSI should have a short-list of recommended

licenses, but the politics of dis-recommending some organization's

license are too much for them.



This isn't actually the case, by the way.  It's not the politics; it's

more the time it takes to do it right.



I sat on the committee that came up with OSI's current classifications.

Its original remit was to evaluate licenses into best/okay/bad, but no

one except me was willing to actually say that a license was bad or that

people shouldn't use it, so we wound up with the existing, basically

fact-based classification scheme.  And we took plenty of time just to

get to that, so it wasn't a matter of time.



I believe I was the only non-lawyer on that committee, except for ESR

who wasn't able to attend most of the meetings.



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