[License-discuss] Retroactively disapproving licenses

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Larry,

I am sorry to say so, but you really made this sound as if you were taking
it as a personal threat. Unnecessarily. Your own license was written by an
attorney, yourself, and is not in such danger as the "crayon" licenses,
which certainly should be deprecated, any my first candidate would be the
SIL Open Font License, which gets used too much for its poor quality of
language. IMO it is self-negating. And its use, rather than something with
better text, damages its own community.

Personally, I recommend three licenses, which are all compatible with each
other. The three cover all business and public-benefit purposes, and I have
a really difficult time seeing that the additional ones give the community
benefit worth the trouble.

I sure make a lot of money reviewing use of Open Source for companies
directly and for law firms and their customers, and this combinatorial mess
and the continuing use of bad text is sort of a full-employment act for
people like me. But not a positive thing for the users or developers.

I am all for OSI changing their rules, if that is what it takes, to
deprecate licenses. I am not holding my breath waiting for it to happen, of
course this has been suggested many times, over decades.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 7:49 PM Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:

> Brad Kuhn wrote in his long and opinionated email:
>
> >>>> I've been suggesting that the OSI should have a dis-approval or
>
> >>>> delisting process, capable of being initiated by someone other than
>
> >>>> the license steward, for a long time, but the OSI has been pretty
>
> >>>> resistant to this idea.
>
>
>
> > Was this put to an actual OSI Board vote when you were on the Board?
>
>
>
> Richard Fontana replied:
>
> No board vote, but it's been informally discussed (probably mainly on this
> list) several times in the past. Actually I believe the OSI today may be
> more receptive to the idea.
>
>
>
> I confess to being angry that some people on here assert authority over
> other lawyers’ work. You don’t have to like or use my licenses, but you
> can’t just dismiss them. Please be more humble.
>
>
>
> Brad has the illusion that his opinions about licenses (and currently
> about jurisdictional clauses in licenses) qualifies him to disapprove
> existing and already-approved licenses. Nothing in OSI’s procedures grants
> him or the current OSI board authority to do that. I honor the fact that he
> has been involved in OSI licensing issues for at least as long as I have
> been, and he can speak up all he wants claiming that his opinions are
> valid. But he is no authority. He is no expert on the legal issues of
> licenses in the US and other countries. He certainly is not a lawyer whose
> opinions matter over those of actual lawyers in some magical way. Any court
> would say so and shut him up.
>
>
>
> For what my own *limited* opinion is worth, I certainly do not delegate
> to him, nor to the OSI board of directors, the right to retroactively
> disapprove my own licenses along with my own carefully-considered
> jurisdictional provisions. And I readily admit, I do not profess to be an
> authority on German or French licenses capable to telling them to change
> their provisions. Brad and the OSI have ONLY the authority to determine
> whether licenses satisfy the Open Source Definition AND NOTHING MORE.
>
>
>
> /Larry
>
>
>
> Lawrence Rosen
>
> 707-478-8932
>
> 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
>
>
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-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP
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