[License-discuss] License pages cleanup project underway

Wed Apr 5 14:59:27 UTC 2023

FWIW, I’ve sometimes been able to find information about licenses and approvals that aren’t on current website (including mailing lists) using the Internet Archive, but it’s a pretty painstaking process and those archives aren’t complete. It is one way to generally determine when a particular license was approved, which may yield information on when it was submitted/discussed, etc.

From: License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Giulia Dellanoce
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 3:13 AM
To: license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] License pages cleanup project underway

Good morning everybody and thank you Stefano for such a nice introduction. 

Being quite a neophyte to the world of open source software licenses, I am getting more and more interested in the subject as I am moving forward with the project, and I really want to do my best to make my internship at OSI as effective and profitable as possible. 

As Stefano pointed out, I'm just having a bit of trouble in finding precise and extensive information about the licenses sent, approved, not approved or withdrawn in the years before 2007. 

Stefano and Simon Phipps already provided me with precious advices and a folder containing some license-discussion-ante-2007 (Mailing List Archives from Russ Nelson), but if any of you knows where I could find some more, please share it with me. 

thank you in advance,

at your complete disposal,

Giulia

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 6:10 PM Stefano Maffulli <stefano at opensource.org <mailto:stefano at opensource.org> > wrote:

Hello folks,

The OSI announced today that we started cleaning up the list of Approved Licenses published on opensource.org <http://opensource.org>  thanks to an intern, Giulia Dellanoce. With the migration to the new website, we moved the list from simple web pages[1] to a structured and consistent approach.

The new site forces licenses to follow a precise template with important metadata like date of approval, link to the approval minutes, version number, category, etc. The template is flexible enough that we'll be able to follow the recommendations of the License Review working group[2] once they're ready.

Giulia started her work a few days ago and already made tremendous progress. The biggest challenges are ahead though: The mailing list archives before 2007 are a lot more convoluted to parse... Also, I'm not sure where the board meeting minutes were kept in the early days.

She's still parsing the material we have in OSI's archives but she may need to tap into the collective memory of the people on this list to track decisions made between 1998 and 2007. 

I'm very excited about this work because it makes the list of Approved Licenses more useful and opens the path to improvements to API access to the list. 

Full announcement: https://blog.opensource.org/open-source-approved-license-registry-project-underway-with-help-of-intern-giulia-dellanoce/

Stay on the lookout for requests from me and Giulia :)

Thanks,

Stef

PS Slim.AI donated the funds that support this internship

[1] For precision, the previous website also had a structure for License pages, but not every license followed it.

[2] https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Working-Groups-Incubator-Projects/Recommendation-License-Review-Process/#ID5

-- 

Executive Director - Open Source Initiative

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