[License-discuss] Fact-gathering on OSI-approved licenses

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 1:25 PM Bruce Perens via License-discuss
<license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>
> Pam,
>
> I am actually more interested in the licenses that OSI has historically rejected, and the reasons given when this has been archived.

I agree, even though attempting to gather that information would be
much more difficult. Just focusing on licenses that have been approved
will give an incomplete and misleading picture, particularly because
the OSI seems to have been institutionally reluctant to admit to
having possibly made policy or administrative mistakes in distant-past
license approvals. Adding to the difficulty is that for the most part
the OSI has not formally rejected licenses at all, yet often the
non-approval disposition of a license submission is (at least
arguably) equivalent to a rejection, and is often spoken of as a
rejection.

As an example, the approval of the Adaptive Public License is arguably
in conflict with the "rejection" (i.e., withdrawal after negative
license-review reaction) of CC0 several years later. But the
"rejection" of CC0 was in line with the "rejection" (withdrawal after
negative license-review reaction) of the MXM license a few years
earlier.

Richard