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

[Lawrence Rosen]

John, once again you state the obvious to support an invalid argument:
> 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.

Do you expect anyone to argue that the GPL isn't the most widely used and popular open source license (although its author might quarrel with the phrase "open source" much as I do to the word "standard")? I'm also comfortable with the suggestion that the Motosoto license is an irrelevancy in the software industry. If your FAQ wants to say that, do so. 

The GPL might also be "standard" in the way that Richard Fontana carefully used that term, but not as your phrase "standard license" implies. I affirm Richard Fontana's interpretation of my earlier note, that OSI often and incorrectly uses the word "standard" to mean "popular" -- and that's not good.  

Popularity and wide use do not a good standard make! Shall I recount the document format wars as an example where the widespread popularity of one standard (fostered by a big company with influence) was successfully fought by a smaller upstart who purportedly did things better? 

OSI's long-running attempt to reduce the number of open source licenses in widespread use doesn't turn OSI into a standards organization, merely advocates for easy answers to complex legal questions....

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at mercury.ccil.org] 
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2014 9:10 AM
To: lrosen at rosenlaw.com; license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on "why standard licenses"?

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