License Proliferation Committee Response

[Brian O'Byrne]

The two projects listed below seem to me to give a very clear division 
of responsibility between license-discuss and 
license-proliferation-discuss.

The two projects are both what I would characterise as license 
selection aids.

In the first project the committee is attempting to make selecting a 
license easier by creating license tiers and indicating that tier-1 
licenses should be used unless there is a compelling reason to do 
otherwise.

In the second project the committee is attempting to provide more 
definite guidance towards a license based on a set of licensor 
priorities.

Neither of these projects (if I understand them correctly) speak to 
the license approval process, except in so far as there may be extra 
steps on approval to place the newly-approved license into a tier and 
to code its licensor priorities.

By that reckoning the license-discuss list can continue to do what it 
has been doing (discussing whether licenses should be approved 
according to the OSD) while license-proliferation-discuss prepares 
its selection aids.

Brian.

On Monday 05 September 2005 03:36, Laura Majerus wrote:
> All, I have been on a family vacation this weekend and am just now
> reading through the backlog of license discuss messages. You guys
> got active all of a sudden. I'm writing this on a Treo, so forgive
> typing misrakes.
>
> I regularly read license-discuss but don't post much because I want
> to be guided by the community and not vice versa.   Russ is the
> head of the OSI license approval committee and makes
> recommendations to the board based on comments from this list about
> licenses to approve. I see Larry's suggestions concerning the OSL
> as related to aproval and not the LP committe's first project
> (i.e., tiering). Our second project is a licensing wizard. We just
> got some programming volunteers for this. I see the LP committee
> doing other projects down the road intended to chip away at license
> proliferation issues. . It's silly to think that tiering will solve
> this issue. It's just a step toward addressing people's concerns.
> One concern is that newbies have trouble picking licenses going
> forward and that's all thqat tiering is supposed to address.
>
> The LP committee is working on getting a first cut of tiering
> factors for the LP-discuss list to comment on. I will certainly
> post here to alert you all when we post our first effort. I expect
> *lots* of discussion when we post that.
>
> Feel free to post questions and I'll happily try to answer them.
>
> Laura
>
>  -----Original Message-----
> From: 	David Barrett [mailto:dbarrett at quinthar.com]
> Sent:	Sat Sep 03 13:21:17 2005
> To:	license-discuss at opensource.org;
> license-proliferation-discuss at opensource.org Subject:	License
> Proliferation Committee Response
>
> Laura --
>
> Given all the comments that everyone has raised, can you summarize
> how the License Proliferation committee intends to respond?  Or if
> you can't right now, can you give the process that you will follow
> to come up with a response?
>
> Speaking only for myself, I'm concerned by the lack of
> participation of the license discuss committee or the OSI board
> (with Russell being the one notable and welcome exception) in what
> appears to be a rather important issue to many.
>
> -david
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-- 
Brian O'Byrne, Statesoft Ltd.
Tel: +353 1 4100 993, +353 86 240 4719
http://www.statesoft.ie/