[License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on "why standard licenses"?

[John Cowan]

Lawrence Rosen scripsit:

> > Mind you, OSI has described itself as a standards body for open
> > source licenses for a long time, see http://opensource.org/about
> > (I believe that text used to be on the home page).
> 
> Perhaps, but that term has thus been misused. There is absolutely
> nothing about OSI – its governance policies, its procedures, its
> membership rules, its board selections, or its activities – that
> would in any sense qualify OSI as a standards organization.

I agree that OSI is not a standards organization *for* licenses.
It has only one standard, the OSD.  But by virtue of that, it is
a standards-defining organization.  There are thousands of SSOs (as
distinct from ISO and the various national standards bodies), and their
organizational structures are extremely diverse, from industry consortia
to closely held companies.

The main OSI activity, of course, is not standards setting or even
standards maintenance, but certification.  It may be compared in a
small way to UL, which both defines standards and certifies a great many
products for compliance to them.

> I'm not quarreling with OSI's attempt to get everyone to use approved
> licenses, but I have long challenged your attempts to steer people
> toward some subset of those licenses. Especially if you hint that they
> are in any way, shape or form "standard" licenses.  That's overreach
> for which you are not legally qualified.

Nonsense.  I and my friend George can constitute ourselves as an SSO with
no formal legal relationship whatsoever, jointly issue standards for
whatever we want, and even certify products for compliance with those
standards.  Nobody has to listen to us, of course.  Indeed, the Scheme
language is standardized by a process that is only one step up from this
(as distinct from Fortran or C, which are ISO standards).  Not that
programming languages necessarily need standards:  Perl 5 has none.

Furthermore, the term "standard" is a regular part of Standard English
and may be used freely by anyone.  (Indeed, Standard English itself is a
standard in every sense despite the complete lack of anything resembling
a standards-setting organization for it.)  By the same token, the GPL is
a standard open-source license and the Motosoto Open Source License is
not, though both are equally OSI certified.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
In politics, obedience and support are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt