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

[Allison Randal]

Hi Bruce,

I'm a firm supporter of the license proliferation position that the OSI
adopted over a decade ago, and we do continue to consider whether a new
license is offering unique value.

But, I consider it highly unlikely that we have such a perfect set of
open source license versions today that we'll never need to change them.
Especially since the law that open source licenses are built on keeps
changing, so over time open source licenses will need to evolve to cope
with a legal environment that the current licenses couldn't anticipate.

Allison

On 06/19/2018 06:02 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:
> 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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