[License-review] When a submission for approval stops being one (was: For Approval: License Zero Reciprocal Public License)

[Rick Moen]

Kyle, you've been gracious and courteous in reaction to commentary,
which I'm sure is appreciated.  (I am not an OSI Board member, merely a
longtime participant from the surrounding open source community.)

I wish to note in passing that you approached license-review with a
licence, which turns out (as you acknowledge) to not be in use for
any software, but rather an experiment.  Moreover, it turns out
explicitly to be a 'draft', one that you keep revising.  As we often
see, your draft includes wording taken from popular OSI Certified
licences; as you may know if you've followed license-{review,discuss},
'built using familiar ingredients' has proven a poor guarantor of quality.

There has been at least a suggestion perhaps from you and certainly from
some others, past and present, that the license-review commentariat and
OSI Board are somehow obliged to spend time and careful consideration on
experimental licences.  After widely held reasons for lacking enthusiasm for
particular licences having been recounted here by Bruce and others, some
claimed in response that OSD ought to be amended to include them.  (On
the bright side, at least your submission(s) is/are lawyer-drafted.)

FWIW, I do not concur that OSI's Board or this mailing list owes any
positive obligation individual participants may feel to set aside 
apathy for particular submissions -- especially 'drafts', peculiar
crayon-licence creations by non-lawyers, licences that seem
substantially duplicative or lacking in a compelling justification,
and/or licences representing zero or effectively zero software.

Also FWIW, I concur with McCoy's and Bruce's feelings on the
use-burdening problems of your general approach.  But, more to the
immediate point, you appear to lack a (finished) submission for OSI's
review process.  You seem to have, instead,  a notion -- one that you've
been attempting to expand into a licence, using this mailing list as a
writing workshop.  That is not this forum's mission, and my sense is
that the effort has worn out its welcome.

I've withheld comment until this moment because I didn't want to sound 
brusque, but I respect your good intentions and thought I'd try to help
suggest candidate reasons why you're getting no traction.

-- 
Cheers,                              « On donne des conseils, mais on ne 
Rick Moen                            donne point la sagesse d'en profiter. »
rick at linuxmafia.com                                     -- La Rochefoucauld
McQ! (4x80)