[License-review] Discussing proposed new licenses

Thu Sep 10 21:45:26 UTC 2015

I think that discussions regarding OPL acceptability wrt OSD and license proliferation would garner no objections.

What you are asking for is a discussion regarding the philosophical advantages of strong vs weak copyleft in a specific domain.  I vote no thanks.

OSET wants their own alternative to MPL (not GPLv3) as a special purpose license.  We have 4:  ECL v2.0, IPA, NOSA 1.3, OFL v1.1.

Of these it seems most similar to ECL in terms of need.  There is strong desire to do open source but the vanilla open source license would face resistance from some segment of stakeholders.  Whether it is a real or just perceived concern by these stakeholders is immaterial if they simply choose not to adopt open source because of those concerns.  In terms of license usage I would guess the OSET community is currently much smaller than the Sakai community was when it asked for ECL approval, and with a lot less code and activity based on what I see in the trustthevote github.  In the year running up to an election I would expect to see a lot more commits.  Maybe I'm not looking in the right place.  Is OSET trying to get approval so vendors start donating code to the foundation?  What is driving the immediate need for OSI approval of a new special purpose license?

>From a license proliferation perspective I'm looking at the OSET github repo and thinking its not worth the effort to do so.  CAVO doesn't even appear to have a repo so I care even less what they think which licenses should be used for voting systems.  Until there's a significant body of work and community I feel it's too early to seek approval for a special purpose license.

The biggest concern I have with the license itself is the response that OSET will attempt to harmonize downstream license incompatibility caused by 3.5B at the OSET stewardship level.  It strikes me as problematic for a license to potentially permit a high level of downstream license fragmentation/confusion even with itself at the same version level.  This may warrant more discussion or maybe I just didn't understand that comment.

Nigel

From: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>
Reply-To: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 1:43 PM
To: OSI License Review <license-review at opensource.org<mailto:license-review at opensource.org>>
Cc: 'CAVO' <cavo at opensource.org<mailto:cavo at opensource.org>>, "Heather J. Meeker" <hmeeker at omm.com<mailto:hmeeker at omm.com>>, "Nigel H. Tzeng" <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu<mailto:Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>>, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>
Subject: Discussing proposed new licenses

Dear OSI Board,

Among the frustrating behavior of some open source folks - including members of your board - is what Nigel may have meant when he referred to "mail list judo." That game was played expertly at Apache too. I hate it.

You repeatedly move discussions from one email list to another in an effort to prevent full discussion and resolution. Each list has its own subscribers and its own narrow focus. Starting anew every few emails is a waste of our time. That is why we can never get clear answers from anyone. For example, when the folks at OSET are asked for specific responses, you bombard the email list with "take this discussion elsewhere..." and they can coyly shut up.

OSET wants their own alternative to GPLv3. The CAVO folks have challenged the OSET Rationale for a proposed new license. That discussion was properly posted on license-review at . Let the conversation take place without meaningless game-playing on email lists. If you've already made up your mind, please just say so and then shut up about moving the discussion to some other secret venue.

I assume there will eventually be a vote on the OSET license. Until then, let us discuss it.

Thanks.

/Larry

From: Simon Phipps [mailto:webmink at opensource.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2015 2:49 AM
To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at opensource.org<mailto:license-review at opensource.org>>
Cc: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>; CAVO <cavo at opensource.org<mailto:cavo at opensource.org>>; Gregory Miller <gmiller at osetfoundation.org<mailto:gmiller at osetfoundation.org>>; Meegan Gregg <meegan at osetfoundation.org<mailto:meegan at osetfoundation.org>>; Christine Santoro <csantoro at osetfoundation.org<mailto:csantoro at osetfoundation.org>>; legal at osetfoundation.org<mailto:legal at osetfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [License-review] [CAVO] FW: OSET Foundation

Hi all,

The License-Review list is for reviewing the conformance of proposed open source licenses against the Open Source Definition<http://opensource.org/osd-annotated>. Please stop cc-ing it on messages that do not perform this function.

Thanks,

Simon
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