[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[John Cowan]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 10:17 AM Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

On 3/18/20 12:40 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Note that I am fully supportive of the position that there may be and
> > are Open Source licenses, in the sense of meeting the OSD's terms,
> > that are not OSI Certified (TM).
>
> Who decides that?
>

You, me, or anyone else.  Law students do a lot of exercises of the form
"Here is a fact situation, here is a legal definition; does the situation
meet the definition?"  That doesn't make them judges or juries, of course.

That's also what we do on license-review: we say if we think a license is
open source, and we can and do disagree.  Sorry to bring up King Charles's
head again, but when I presented the MS-PL to that list, it was because I
thought it was open source; I still think so, and indeed the Board
eventually agreed with me, so that it became not merely open source but OSI
Certified (tm).  But no part of the OSD involves the notion that a license
cannot be open source if it is not certified.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
He played King Lear as though someone had played the ace.
        --Eugene Field
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