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

[Bruce Perens]

Allison,

The biggest problem here is not that OSI is slow to approve licenses, that
they provide insufficient feedback, or that they are using the wrong
software.

It's a greater problem that OSI continues to approve licenses on a regular
basis, twenty years after the process started.

There aren't that many actually useful variations on the licenses that
actually pass the OSD. There are actually only three useful licenses, a
gift-style, a sharing-with-rules-style, and something in between. Given
Affero and GPL3 terms on those three, essentially all purposes for Open
Source can be carried out. All else is embellishment.

What we are seeing now are licenses that satisfy a particular attorney.
These are often introduced as being necessary for the specific needs of the
venue (Europe, for example) or a particular organization (NASA, focusing on
restrictions on the public domain). It's arguable that these licenses are
more useful than existing well-tested ones, even for those organizations.
For example, I don't see how NASA can *really *benefit from imposing terms
upon public-domain works or making itself a secondary beneficiary of
licenses executed by others.

The license reviewers aren't waiting to be surprised by some worthy
innovation in Open Source licensing. No such thing is coming by. They are
mainly working to make sure that OSI understands when a license should be
rejected, and why.

If OSI were to conclude that licenses, at this point, should be approved
only when there are *compelling *reasons to do so, the community would
benefit.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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