[License-discuss] Generic process for removing approved licenses. Re: REMOVE AAL from list of approved licenses

[Henrik Ingo]

This is clearly a proposal that's been a long time coming. Whether it will
be these licenses or some others, eventually OSI will be in a situation
where we want to remove approved licenses.

Since this is a serious decision, I'd like to open a separate thread on
what might be an appropriate process to implement such removals. I'll
propose something to get the discussion started:

 - There should be a formally elected person or committee with authority
even just to (formally) start discussion about removing a specific license.
This is to protect and ease tensions in situations where 1 list member
proposes a license for removal and a proponent or user of that license is
therefore forced to forcefully defend it.

 - As this process doesn't exist yet, I'm not saying that Josh' proposal is
out of place. But if such a gatekeeping process existed, this would not be
counted as a proposal to act. In such a situation Josh may have phrased his
email differently, for example as a question: "Why was this approved back
in 2002?" or "Is anybody using this license?".

- If the discussion on license-review seems to support the view that the
license should be removed, because it fullfils some criteria that should be
defined, the license removal committee can proceed to a removal process.

- The criteria for removal could be: 1) license does not in fact conform
with the OSD (was erroneously approved), 2) does not appear to be used for
any currently available/working software, 3) (this one is contentious)
license is de-facto only used in ways that go against the spirit of OSD /
software freedom.

Steps in removal process:

- OSI (license removal committee) will document the exact reasons why
license is proposed for removal.

- OSI will spend reasonable efforts to find out whether license is still in
use.

- In particular, OSI will contact the original author/submitter of the
license and all projects that at the time of approval were using or
intending to use the license.

- If any existing users are found, OSI will discuss whether they can and
are willing to move to a better license. Also it is possible that a project
using the license doesn't object to removal even if they continue to use it.

- If the license author can still be found, OSI will discuss whether the
author is willing to publish a new version that would comply with our
current view of the OSD. In this case the license should be superceded
rather than removed. (I think at this point we should focus on removing
licenses considered mistakes. Reducing the number of licenses is a separate
concern.)

- Alternatively the license author can propose that the license be
deprecated and removed.

- After the following steps have been taken, OSI will document the outcome
and conclusions so far, and propose that the license be removed from the
list of approved licenses. This notification will be sent to
license-review, the affiliate members list, a list of corporate
sponsors/interested parties (if it exists?), other stakeholders like Linux
distributions, media, etc... For best publicity, it makes sense to batch
together all concurrent removal proposals into one notification.

- A feedback period of 15 months is required before the actual removal
takes place.

- After 15 months, the license removal committee, having considered all
feedback it has  received, and taken into account potential newly found
projects where license is in use, can decide to remove the license from the
list of approved licenses.

- Removed licenses will be listed on a separate page on opensource.org,
together with the decision and justification that caused them to be removed.



henrik



On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 12:17 AM Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org> wrote:

> All,
>
> A submitter to License-Review just pointed out that we actually approved
> this license back in 2002:
>
> https://opensource.org/licenses/AAL
>
> There is absolutely no question that the AAL would not meet our license
> requirements today.  Both the badgeware requirements and the presumption
> of single authorship are prohibitive.  Fortunately, the AAL is also not
> popular; in fact, I can't even find it in the Github survey stats.
>
> As such, I move that the license be submitted to the board for removal
> from the list of approved licenses, possibly by creating a new category
> of "suspended and nonreusable licenses".
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
>
> _______________________________________________
> The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not
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> Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.
>
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>
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>


-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
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www.openlife.cc

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