[License-discuss] Possible alternative was: Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) Version 0.4.1

[Richard Fontana]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 01:50:42PM -0500, Christopher Sean Morrison wrote:

> If I recall correctly, there were no objections to CC0 when it was
> submitted for OSI approval.  It was withdrawn by the steward after
> prolonged patent clause commentary.  considering what the
> implications of explicitly denying patent rights may have on the
> liberal licenses.  That commentary was not grounds for disapproval
> and not a fault of CC0, it was primarily a social and license impact
> discussion, but it was withdrawn regardless.  So …

I think it was withdrawn before the discussion was complete. I believe
there were some who felt it was inappropriate for an OSI-approved
license to explicitly deny patent rights. 

> The only question I have is whether the license steward is the only
> one eligible to formally submit CC0 for reconsideration?  If not, I
> will formally submit it myself as there is ample evidence of
> prolific use, niche utility that differentiates it from other
> licenses, and no known clauses that conflict with the OSD.

https://opensource.org/approval implies that it's supposed to be the
license steward. The *GPLv3 cases suggest that there's an implied
exception to this where there's no likelihood that the license steward
will submit a license that is nonetheless likely to be of significant
interest to many in the OSI community.