[License-discuss] Retroactively disapproving licenses

[Russell Nelson]

On 12/13/22 22:48, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> Brad and the OSI have ONLY the authority to determine whether licenses 
> satisfy the Open Source Definition AND NOTHING MORE.

Yesbut. We are also the representatives of the idea of Open Source to 
the community. As such, we have a responsibility to promote the 
creation, promulgation, distribution, and use of Open Source software. 
Taking that into account, are we well or poorly served by having a 
proliferation of slightly different licenses?

That's not a new discussion. Not new at all. But since your point is in 
fact true, what can we do about license proliferation?

Not nothing, I claim. Here are my somethings:

 1. We can merge the entire class of BSD licenses into a parameterized
    BSD license. So instead of a "BSD" license, we have a "BSD-2,3"
    license, and instead of a "MIT" license, we have a "BSD-1,3"
    license, and we replace the approval listing for those two to point
    to the parameterized license. That will help people to see the
    differences between BSD-class licenses.
 2. We can go through all the licenses to see how many are actually
    being used in new software, and deprecate ( "do not use in new
    software" ) any licenses which are not being used for new software.
 3. If there are some lightly used licenses and if the license permits
    it, fork all existing software under an appropriate more heavily
    used license.
 4. Following up on #1 and #4, persuade users of lightly used licenses
    to switch to an appropriate more heavily used license.

Abusing Rabbi Hillel, "There are only two licenses: reciprocal and 
public. All the rest is commentary".
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