[License-review] Adapting the license-review process to AI

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:23:58AM +0800, Roland Turner via License-review wrote:
> > 3. The OSAID certifies complete software systems, not just licensing
> > documents.  So we will need to verify that the terms submitted are
> > actually applied to the software available.  To date, L-R has operated
> > by waiting for folks to submit documents to us; the OSAID will require
> > us -- or someone else -- to perform a compliance review.
> 
> Do you have a basis for this?
> 
> As I understand the OSAID the intention is still that OSI approve the terms
> under which a licensee receives a system, all that's changed is that those
> terms will be spread across multiple instruments and potentially multiple
> areas of law rather than simply being distribution terms in a single
> copyright license/agreement. There does not appear to be any intention to
> set up a per-system certification body; that would require OSI spinning up
> one of the world's largest certification bodies which would appear to be far
> outside OSI's scope and capabilities.

That is also my understanding, but I'd like to have some official
confirmation about this from OSI, as it will impact this discussion and
more generally the work of all the volunteers participating on this
list.

There's another related practical question: what would be the published
*output* of OSAID-related reviews?

For traditional license review, the output is
https://opensource.org/licenses , i.e., a (tagged) list of licenses,
each pointing to the full license text. For OSAID, I'm hence assuming
(but would like to have confirmation) that it will be a list of "terms
of use".

One practical problem is that terms of use are less often properly
versioned than licenses, so we will probably need to both self-host
(which we already do) and possibly self-version (which would be new).
Or maybe insist that submitters properly version terms of use as a
pre-condition for evaluation.

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack at upsilon.cc . https://upsilon.cc/zack  _. ^ ._
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