[License-review] For Legacy Approval: TOPPERS License

[Richard Fontana]

The OSI Board discussed the submission of the TOPPERS license for
legacy approval.

In the license-review discussion it was not fully clear (and is not
fully clear from examination of the TOPPERS project website[1])
whether the operative license for the project thus far has been the
English-language license submitted for legacy approval (though
twice-amended in the course of license-review discussion), or a
Japanese-language original of which the submitted English-language
text is an official (from the project's perspective) translation, or
perhaps both.

We ask the license submitter to clarify whether there is a
Japanese-language license that governs (exclusively or otherwise) the
TOPPERS project. If so, we ask the license submitter to seek approval
for that license as an 'International License' in accordance with the
proposed procedure outlined by Mike Milinkovich on license-discuss
back in June:
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2015-June/001857.html

One concern here is that we wouldn't want to approve an English
language version of a license (even if 'official') if there is also an
official non-English counterpart license that has not specifically
undergone OSI review, because of the potential for confusion and the
possibility of substantive deviation from the Japanese-language
license text. It is conceivable that examination of the
non-English-language license would result in a conclusion that it is
not OSD-conformant even if there was also a conclusion that the
submitted English-language license is OSD-conformant.

Richard

[1]https://www.toppers.jp/en/project.html