Questions to OSI Board quorum

Ernest Prabhakar prabhaka at apple.com
Thu Nov 17 15:13:08 UTC 2005


Hi David,

On Nov 16, 2005, at 9:01 PM, David Barrett wrote:
> The question is who's value judgment runs the OSI, and for that I'd  
> say it must be the board.  And given that the board consists of  
> many people, the only way to sample that judgment is by vote.

While that's true in theory, I actually think it is false in  
practice. :-)   I like to think the OSI Board reflects the larger  
understanding of the overall community.  Thus, while the Board  
ultimately does (and must) decide, I would hope they evaluate the  
perspectives expressed on this list as a(nother) representative  
sample of community opinion.

To be sure, I don't dispute your desire for your 'day in court.'    
But if the opinions on this list are overwhelmingly on one side or  
other other, I think that's a reasonable indication of how the Board  
would likely rule.

And yeah, I tend to agree with Eric that the community as a whole  
prefers a high bar of paranoia be applied to new license proposals,  
and the comments on this list are valid evidence of that.  We're all  
hopefully writing code that could survive for a long time, and even a  
1% chance of abuse becomes a large risk when multiplied by many  
projects over several years...

-- Ernie P.




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