[License-review] OSI license approval is not the place for copyleft experimentation (was: License Committee report)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

McCoy Smith wrote at 09:36 (PST) on Monday:
> there were a few people beyond the license submitters for LZPL & SSPL who
> were saying there should be room for experimentation around copyleft and
> that those licenses would qualify as such

I don't think supporting "experimentation around copyleft" (which is
something I also support) de-facto means that OSI should consider such
experimentation as a reason to approve an experimental license.  This is
like asking the FDA to approve a still-experimental drug.

As I pointed out in another post, AGPL was in public use for about seven
years before any AGPL was approved by OSI.

copyleft-next, the primary place where experimentation on copyleft is
happening now (in a very public project of license drafting) has (AFAICT)
also not been submitted to OSI for approval yet, and it's been around for
more than 5 years now.  (Please do correct me if I'm wrong, I couldn't find
any indication of this when searching opensource.org for copyleft-next.)

I think it's completely reasonable for OSI to advise would-be copyleft
experimentors to start a thread on the copyleft-next mailing list about
their ideas, rather than try to slam through an experimental license draft
that is less than a month old through the OSI review process.

> I for one see LZPL and SSPL as very similar in the issues they raise in
> those areas and think they should be probably get an up or down decision
> together.

I think the problem is that the only way OSI can really make an up or down
decision is by doing OSD interpretation.  I don't think MongoDB is playing
fairly by attempting to fast-track that OSD interpretation by surprising the
community with a license that they are *still* unwilling to draft in public
with the community.

It's particularly bad when the license steward's own publicly stated
intention is to never themselves be bound by the license, and their primary
business plan is to offer a "way out of the license" by selling proprietary
licenses, something that they literally advertise with a pop-up bubble on
the SS Public License's official page [0].

Admittedly, an up or down decision is likely the only way to release OSI
from the heavy and unfair political pressure that MongoDB is placing on the
OSI, so I would encourage the OSI to actually reject the license on
procedural grounds, pointing out that other copylefts of this nature were
not OSI approved for many years and that MongoDB should come back after many
years and resubmit.

[0] If you visit
    https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license with a
    Javscript-enabled browser, you get a pop-up that asks you if you have
    "Questions about Pricing and Sales?".  It's the first time I've seen the
    official draft page for a purported Open Source license ask you: "Are
    you sure you really want to take our software under this license?"
-- 

Bradley M. Kuhn

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