[License-discuss] Rejected license list [was Re: TrueCrypt license (not OSI-approved; seeking history, context).]

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 21:36:56 -0400
Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 16:35:20 -0700
> Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:
 
> > Your list would
> > presumably be a subset, as some licenses might have been submitted
> > and rejected without a later, false claim to being open source.
> 
> There are also licenses that are clearly (to me) open source but which
> have not been and are unlikely ever to be evaluated by the OSI. 
> 
> But there is a separate category of licenses that are claimed to be
> open source by their license stewards (at least implicitly in
> characterizing the software as open source) but have not been
> submitted for approval -- TrueCrypt is presumably an example of this. 

To clarify this: by the first category I mean licenses that are or
would be generally accepted as open source on some pragmatic and
historical analysis but, largely because they are legacy or obscure
licenses are unlikely ever to be submitted for approval. A somewhat
atypical example, but the one that first came to mind and certainly
historically notorious, is the 4-clause BSD license. Atypical because
the commentary on the OSI website seems to me to hint that it is not or
ought not be thought of as open source (see:
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause
[unless I'm reading too much into what is said there]).

- RF