[License-discuss] Evolving the License Review process for OSI

[Rick Moen]

I'll follow Christopher's good example, and also try to cut to the
chase.

Quoting Christopher Sean Morrison via License-discuss (license-discuss at lists.opensource.org):

> Except that we don’t need a representative number.  If use cannot be
> found, that would not imply there isn’t any.  I certainly haven’t said
> that.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I've been distracted by other things and might
have missed something), but wasn't the idea to use licence auditing to
determine which OSI Approved licences are unused?  Leaving aside any
wrangling over 'representative numbers', my basic point (and, I believe,
Thorsten's) is that just grepping through several large public repos
doesn't tell the tale on the question posed, because of too-limited search
scope, e.g., missing everyone who didn't drink the GitHub Kool-Aid.

> Doing nothing is not constructive either, imho, and that is perhaps
> where we disagree.

In science, nothing is quite as tragic as an experiment with
inconclusive results, because you've done a lot of work, have lost
months or years, and still don't have an answer.  If I correctly
understand what is proposed (grepping though large public repos for
licensing references), the derived data seem doomed to be inconclusive.

Or to put it another way, it's a classic managerial antipattern (and
also failed classical syllogism) to think 'We must do something.  
X is something.  Therefore we must do X.'