License Proliferation

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Sep 3, 2005, at 10:17 AM, Ender Batur wrote:

> So, these ideas(?) will focus the OSI efforts to standardize the OS
> licenses by providing templates to the OS community worldwide, and
> prevent their relatively limited resources spared for individual
> license approval requests.

Everybody already knows that the "standard" licenses are the BSD, MIT,
GPL, LGPL and APL (maybe I forgot one ;-). We do not need the OSI to
tell us that (or to draft their own template versions of them). Just
because a license is not standard does not mean it isn't open source.
That's the reason d'être of the OSD and OSI: maintaining consensus on
what is "open source", reflecting that consensus in the OSD, and giving
the seal of approval to EVERY license that meets the OSD.

OSI should not discriminate between licenses. Instead it should move
the bar of the OSD and tell which previously approved licenses fall
below that bar and for what reasons.

Chris

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