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

[Henrik Ingo]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 11:41 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>
wrote:

> 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),


If this is the case, then apparently the licenses used for such
justification still fall under #1.


> 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).
>
>
Maybe also in this case.

But I wonder whether this is really a problem or risk for OSI? It seems
some who have their licenses rejected go on to vocally criticize the OSI.
But I haven't observed that the mainstream open source community would
sympathize very much with those outbursts. If anything there has been a
surge to strengthen the OSI position to defend the "conservative" and
unchanged OSD.

Cleanup for its own sake is also a valuable activity. All I'm saying is
let's start with attacking the very obvious problem cases first and see how
that goes.

henrik

-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
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