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

[Bruce Perens]

OK, so not just whether it passes the OSD but whether it provides any
unique value, too.

Sure we need new licenses for new case law. But how many of the licenses
submitted actually *were *an attempt to catch up with new case law? There
hasn't been much other than GPL3.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Allison Randal <allison at opensource.org>
wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > License-review mailing list
> > License-review at lists.opensource.org
> > http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-
> review_lists.opensource.org
> >
>
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-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP - CEO, Legal Engineering
Standards committee chair, license review committee member, co-founder,
Open Source Initiative
President, Open Research Institute; Board Member, Fashion Freedom
Initiative.
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