[License-discuss] Some formerly-approved licenses not listed under opensource.org/licenses/ (was: SPDX License List v1.14 & OSI questions)

[W. Trevor King]

There was a 2012 discussion [1] about some licenses (e.g. the AFL-1.0
and AFL-1-1, etc.) which were approved by the OSI (e.g. [2,3]) but are
not currently listed on the website [4,5].  As of at least 2005, Larry
(the AFL author) was saying that the earlier licenses were superseded,
but it didn't sound like he was suggesting them for retirement [6].
By the 2012 discussion, Larry was suggesting versions before 3.0 be
retired [7].  And John took a dive into the Internet Archive to
unearth the history for a number of licenses [8].  He didn't find the
original AFL-1.0, but it's there on 2002-08-05 [9].  Karl (CCed)
sounded like he was planning on updating the website to include the
previously approved, now superseded/retired, currently unlisted
licenses [10], but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.  Are there
still plans to restore these unlisted licenses (to [5])?

It would be nice to have the version-controlled, machine-readable
source at [11] be canonical and be used as source for the website
[4,5].  It sounds like Paul (CCed) was planning on something like that
as of January this year [12].  But with the authoritative-ness of that
repo still in flux, maybe it's better to update the Drupal database
[13] directly?

Also, the superseded/retired page is not very discoverable.  I'd
recommend linking to it from [4], and also from [14] (which already
has “superseded licenses, or retired licenses” text which could be
turned into a link).

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2012-April/017762.html
     Subject: SPDX License List v1.14 & OSI questions
     Date: Mon Apr 30 17:25:11 UTC 2012
[2]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2002-June/005443.html
     Subject: Academic Free License
     Date: Thu Jun 27 12:38:39 UTC 2002
[3]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2002-August/005736.html
     Subject: Academic Free License
     Date: Wed Aug 21 19:00:35 UTC 2002
[4]: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
[5]: https://opensource.org/licenses/do-not-use.html
[6]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2005-August/010528.html
     Subject: de-recomendation of Larry Rosen's licenses/clarify web site
     Date: Tue Aug 16 01:34:12 UTC 2005
[7]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2012-April/017771.html
     Subject: SPDX License List v1.14 & OSI questions
     Date: Mon Apr 30 20:19:24 UTC 2012
[8]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2012-April/017766.html
     Subject: SPDX License List v1.14 & OSI questions
     Date: Mon Apr 30 19:19:14 UTC 2012
[9]: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20020805135807/http://www.opensource.org:80/licenses/academic.php
[10]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2012-April/017772.html
      Subject: SPDX License List v1.14 & OSI questions
      Date: Mon Apr 30 22:38:27 UTC 2012
[11]: https://github.com/OpenSourceOrg/licenses
[12]: https://github.com/OpenSourceOrg/licenses/issues/47#issuecomment-270044446
      Subject: Is this still not authoritative?
      Date: Jan 2, 2017, 6:46 PM PST
[13]: https://opensource.org/faq#improve-osi-site
[14]: https://opensource.org/licenses/

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