[License-discuss] History of approved and not approved licenses

[Engel Nyst]

Hello license-discuss,

Last week there was a need for a history of rejected licenses. That 
relates (to me) with Luis' previous calls for data on the approved licenses.

I'm interested in open licensing, and I want to have a better and more 
systematic view for myself on the licenses attempted in the past, and on 
the issues brought out by people on these mailing lists, so I took this 
opportunity to work on it.

I added in the OSI wiki data that may be of interest. The focus of this 
work is on links to existing content from public archives, that is, to 
data as it is publicly available, keeping low the level of information 
drawn from this data.

Please take a look at the new pages and sections.

*Not approved licenses list*:
http://wiki.opensource.org/archived_not_approved_licenses

Please note that these are not rejected licenses. The list includes 
almost any licenses (I read) that haven't been approved, but submitted 
and/or discussed on license-review and/or license-discuss before that.

Withdrawn, sent back for some reason, submitted and apparently missed, 
or not submitted at all (only asked about).

Some licenses have short notes. These are sketches, with or without a 
summary on the license text. Example of such summary: "based on MIT 
template with added Sleepycat copyleft condition".

These notes were intended as minimal descriptive-only notes (no 
judgments), contained and undisputed in the discussions linked to. In 
the measure possible, that is, and as work-in-progress. The reader would 
[have to] check the link(s) to the discussion(s) for anything substantial.
Please, take a look and review them as you see fit.

There are no summaries of the discussion threads, and no official 
positions. I was thinking these can be added/replaced at a second pass, 
from the license committee reports for example? I didn't do that, though.


*Approved and superseded*:
http://wiki.opensource.org/license_comment_sweep

Added approval threads.
Added section for superseded licenses, intended for issues solved in 
next revisions in particular.
Added section with several pre-2005 license committee reports (I don't 
seem to find pre-2005 board minutes on the site).
Added a few questions to "Luis Has Not Yet Reviewed" section (with 
apologies to Luis! it was a temporary place for lack of a better idea, 
those should probably be deleted now...)


*OSD resources*:
http://wiki.opensource.org/osd_interpretation

These are links to discussion threads, split in two sections.

First section are links to OSD direct questions/proposals. I added links 
to public emails that start a new thread targeting directly the subject 
(i.e. "Why this or that in the OSD?"). I did not try to manage all 
content in the archives. Instead, the data is almost only those emails 
that start a discussion about the OSD. Of course, due to the method 
there is no representative sampling in this section. They're a low 
number of links to content, common or uncommon, interesting or not, just 
the same, up to your judgment.

The second section is for commonalities between OSI-approved licenses. 
It has links to proposed criteria for classifying licenses, in view of 
gathering data/specification for license tools.


All links are to public web archives, mostly 2000-2005 and 2011-2013 I 
believe, with some lower coverage for 2006-2009 at most... if I remember 
correctly. Most board minutes (license committee reports) are not 
covered, and not cross-checked.

Please, check them out and use them as you consider fit. Thoughts, 
changes, feedback, removals, tomatoes, are all welcome...


-- 
~enyst

"Excuse me, Professor Lessig, but may I ask you to sign this CLA, so 
that we have legally your permission to publish your CC-licensed words?"
   ~ Permission Culture, take two.