[License-review] [License-discuss] Evolving the License Review process for OSI

[Smith, McCoy]

>>From: License-discuss [mailto:license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org] On Behalf Of Luis Villa
>>Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 4:46 PM
>>To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at lists.opensource.org>
>>Cc: license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>>Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [License-review] Evolving the License Review process for OSI

>>Imagine trying to understand US constitutional law if all you had were clerk's notes of the US Supreme Court's lunch discussions - that's roughly what being told "you can understand the OSD by reading the mailing list archives" is.

As someone who has done quite a bit of reading through the archives over the years for various projects or analyses, I would affirm that referring anyone to the archives is to impose on them a fairly difficult burden, and all but the most determined (and perhaps the most familiar with several years of mailing list history) would be willing to pursue.
There isn’t really a good way (at least that I’ve found) to search and find useful postings on past statements or topics of interest from the mailing list archives, and archiving just based on thread title (with some indexing by year/month) makes it often quite difficult to find historical information.
I suppose, if one were so inclined – and had sufficient skill – one could construct a scraper to take the archives and do inquiries against it, but I’m not aware of any such tool that currently exists.  I’ve at times contemplated trying to do one or get one done, but haven’t yet had a project that would merit the effort (although there are a couple of legal journal articles I’ve thought of over the years for which a scraper would be quite useful in pulling citations for).

The problem is particularly acute when references are made to past approvals/disapprovals on licenses as precedent for current positions or decisions.  In this way, I think Luis’ analogy is fairly apt, although I would analogize it to trying to do legal precedent citation without key word indices or Shepard’s citations, and just having the federal or regional case reporters [which will be familiar to US attorneys but maybe not to others].


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