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

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 2:08 PM Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:
>
>> Since none of our current problem licenses are (3), maybe we could skip
>> that criterion?  It seems too subjective to actually employ.  Here's my
>> suggested criteria based on yours:
>>
>> 1. license does not in fact conform to the OSD (was erroneously approved)
>>
>> 2. does not appear to be used for any currently available/working
>> software *and is redundant with more popular licenses* (added condition
>> mine).
>
>
> I would like to postpone the activity on #2. Let's first focus on licenses that have actual problems. Arguably, if a license isn't being used anyway, it cannot be an urgent problem.

There are some influential people who use the fact that a given
obscure license was approved ~20 years ago to argue for approval of
new licenses with provisions that are problematic from a software
freedom perspective, or to justify policy positions on what open
source means that are at odds with mainstream views in open source
(notably in the standards context), or simply to cast doubt on the
legitimacy of the OSI and the OSD. I believe that makes the problem
somewhat urgent in some cases (perhaps not in the case of licenses in
the badgeware category, though).

Richard