License Committee Report for December 2009

[Michael Tiemann]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

> I'm the chair of the license approval committee.  This is my report
> for the current set of licenses under discussion.  The OSI board will
> be meeting December 2.
>
> Proposition #1: that we turn all approved licenses into generic
> templates even if submitted as party-specific licenses.  This will
> immediately convert a number of licenses which are Mozilla instances
> into "See Mozilla Public License" references.  It will also allow
> submittors of legacy licenses such as PostgreSQL and BlackBox to
> submit a license which they are merely users of, and allow us to
> accept that license as they received it, but approve it for use by the
> rest of the open source community.
>
> Note that Proposition #1 is of my own invention and has not bee
> discussed on the mailing list.  This email is going out long enough
> before the board meeting for sufficient discussion of its wisdom to
> happen.  I will convey the result of that discussion to the board.  It
> needs to be in the report because approval of BlackBox is dependent
> upon it.
>

Perhaps we could prototype what this would look like and solicit community
feedback for 45 days, and then either adopt or modify as appropriate.  I
definitely think that to maintain our standing as a trusted reference with
many government organizations, we need to make absolutely sure that this is
something with a lot of public scrutiny and support, not something that we
did by ourselves because we are clever.

M