[License-review] moving to an issue tracker [was Re: Some notes for license submitters]

[Allison Randal]

There are two general situations where the board requests or suggests
changes to a license:

- The text submitted does not comply with the OSD, so we can't approve it

- The text submitted is ambiguous, and while it might comply with the
OSD, it also might not, and so we can't approve it

The submitter is free to ignore the request or suggestion from the
board, but the license won't be approved at that point without some change.


But, far more informally and long before the board reviews a license,
there's a great deal of value in the discussions that happen in the
public around a license either before a license is submitted to the OSI
or during the review process. The submitter is free to ignore that
feedback, but they may also find that the experience of the open source
community genuinely does improve their license. The OSI certainly
doesn't require a public review and revision process, but we do
recognize it as a healthy, modern best practice in open source licensing.

Allison

On 06/19/2018 01:03 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:
> It's nice when contributors are /willing /to change their license text
> as part of the review process. That has been *one* in four of the
> recently submitted ones. The others either did not have their attorneys
> directly engaged with the license-review mailing list, or their
> attorneys were only willing to explain the license, rather than alter it.
> 
> IMO license review is generally a policy discussion, and having a linear
> flow works well. Balloon text review works well when everybody's
> checking it regularly, as they were during the GPL3 review process.
> 
>     Thanks
> 
>     Bruce
> 
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 12:49 PM, Allison Randal <allison at opensource.org
> <mailto:allison at opensource.org>> wrote:
> 
>     One thing I've seen work well for
>     this kind of process is to have an "review" directory and an "approved"
>     directory, so that licenses in draft can go through multiple revisions
>     with clear diffs between each revision, and then the final PR to
>     "approve" the license just changes the directory.
> 
> 
> 
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