Questions to OSI Board quorum

Russell Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Tue Nov 15 20:27:17 UTC 2005


David Barrett writes:
 > The OSI currently allows very strong discrimination against those who 
 > would take "open" source "closed".

Right.  That's the goal.  Preserving the freedom to fork is another
goal.  Discriminating is not preserving that freedom for all parties.
It just preserves the freedom for some parties.

What you want is not attainable in an open source license.  Give it
up.  Even if you got the license, most developers would look at "All
your code are belong to us" and run away screaming.  So it's not like
you're giving us any incentive to bend your away.  We've approved
licenses before, saying "dang, but this isn't a great license" and
time has shown us correct by the licenses' lack of adoption.

We don't want open source projects to fail.  We want you to succeed.
Thus, I'm not going to recommend to the board that we go out of our
way to help you fail; not even a little bit.

The OVPL has consumed huge amounts of my personal resources, and now
that the OSI board has spoken on your license, I'm going to give it a
rest for a while.  You can stop CC'ing me on your replies; I receive
perfectly well all mail sent to both osi at source.org and
license-discuss at opensource.org.

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