OSI Certification Process is Broken?

[Brice, Richard]

I too must voice my concern about the OSI Certification Process. In
September of this year, I requested that two licenses be given OSI
Certification (Alternate Route Open Source License and Alternate Route
Library Open Source License). These licenses are very, very similar to the
GPL and LGPL. They differ in that they offer a broader disclaimer of
warranties and licensees indemnify the author from third party tort claims
(these licenses are applied to software that is used in the design and
analysis of highway bridge structures).

These licenses have been drafted by the Office of the Attorney General, of
the State of Washington. In the process of drafting these licenses, we
obtained permission from the Free Software Foundation to base our licenses
on the GPL and LGPL. 

Two members of this list were in agreement that the licenses I posted were
indeed Open Source. (See postings from Seth David Schoen on 9/7/1999 and
Bruce Perens on 9/18/1999).

After the Washington State Attorney General made a few minor revisions to
the license, in response to FSF requests, I reposted the request for OSI
certification on 10/1/1999 and 10/29/1999. Neither posting received any
discussion.

With that, I figured an OSI certification would soon follow. However, it
didn't

In my opinion, I've held up my end of the bargain, but the OSI has fallen a
little short. In response to the 5 steps for license approval,
1.	License has been posted to this list and I clearly identified myself
2.	License conforms with OSD.
3.	License has been on list since 9/7/1999 and all publicly stated
concerns have been resolved
4.	I don't know if OSI sought out any legal advice, by the authors of
the license certainly did
5.	The license still conforms with OSD and there does not seem to be
any outstanding issues. So, to quote the OSI approval instructions "we will
notify you that the license has been approved, copy it to our Web site, and
add it to the list below".

I've done all that was asked of me, but OSI has yet to do their part in step
5.

It seems to me that the OSI Certification process is in some way broken.

Richard Brice, PE
WSDOT Bridge and Structures Office