[License-discuss] Retroactively disapproving licenses

[Pamela Chestek]

To do some foreshadowing, the Working Group that was formed to make 
recommendations for improving the license review process will soon be 
publishing its recommendation. This was originally within their remit, 
but the group agreed that it was complex enough (and frankly I think we 
were all a little tired at this point) that it should be a separate 
undertaking. Personally, I think the OSI has to tread carefully to avoid 
unintended consequences and therefore needs to have a lot more 
information before deciding whether and how to delist a license, such as:

How many projects are using the licenses
How significant they are
How many downstream users there are, and whether they have relied on the 
status as "open source" in some way, e.g., suddenly a component will 
have to be removed because it no longer has an "open source" license
Whether anyone is doing marketing around the term "open source" for a 
license considered for delisting

I'm sure with more thought there is other information that would be 
relevant.

So McCoy, are you volunteering to head up a working group to work on 
this question? 😁

Pam
Chair, License Committee
Open Source Initiative


On 12/14/2022 11:30 AM, McCoy Smith wrote:
>>> From: License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Lawrence Rosen
>>> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2022 7:48 PM
>>> To: license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>>> Subject: [License-discuss] Retroactively disapproving licenses
>
>>> 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.
> FWIW, I've got to disagree with Larry on some of this. I think it is within the power of the OSI board of directors to "disapprove" previously approved licenses (i.e., remove them from the approve license list), and in fact, there are a handful of licenses (none of them written by Larry) which I -- and I believe others -- maintain should not have been approved by the OSI because they have provisions that violate the OSD. I also think that there are other factors, beyond OSI conformance, that can, and should, go into license approval (for example, a license is so poorly or ambiguously drafted that it can create problems for users, or -- for example -- it explicitly omits certain rights -- like patent -- that can result in them being non-open).
>
> In fact, a couple of years ago, I ran for the OSI board with this issue as one of my platform positions:
> https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI%20Board%20of%20Directors/Board%20Member%20Elections/2020%20Individual%20and%20Affiliate%20Elections/Smith2020
>
> Of course, I wasn't elected so I suspect the OSI board has no interest in pursuing my ideas, but I do believe the Board can -- if it wants -- remove license from the list or indicate that a particular licenses have problematic or disfavorable provisions or results and not approve them or flag them for potential users.
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