Official License Anti-Proliferation policy?

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Hi all,

On Apr 11, 2005, at 8:13 PM, Laura Majerus wrote:
> While I don't yet know exactly what the license proliferation  
> committee will recommend to the board about tiering overall,  I do  
> know that the Gpl will not be placed in a non-recomended tier.  No  
> way.
>
> I personally think we need a word instead of 'deprecated' by the  
> way because it has some negative meanings in the non-technical  
> world.  'Not recomended anymore' is closer to our intent.

If I understand the category correctly, I don't mind the term  
deprecated; perhaps 'legacy' would also work.   For example, now that  
APSL 2.0 is out, I would be perfectly fine if APSL 1.0/1.1/1.2 were  
considered deprecated (though since there's a trivial upgrade, maybe  
that's redundant).

However, we periodically had requests like "This open source project  
has been around so long we can't contact the original authors to  
relicense it, but we need OSI approval to use it."  Licenses like  
that, which nobody intends to be used by *new* projects -- and nobody  
cares if we diss -- seem fine as deprecated.

Of course, if the OSI tries to deprecate a license that some of us  
think are still viable (like, say MPL :-), that could get ugly...

> It's impossible to opine on whether licenses we haven't seen are  
> duplicative. Sorry.  But the three  criteria are for license  
> approval going FORWARD.  We're not going to apply them retroactively.

Thanks for clarifying that, it simplifies things enormously.

> Laura Majerus
> OSI Director of Legal Affairs

Laura, Russ:  So, can we get an official statement about whether this  
list/committee (license-discuss) is still in existence, or whether it  
has been superseded by this rules change?  Or, do we need to "re-up"  
if we want to play in the new regime?

-- Ernie P.