[License-discuss] the role of OSI and the license list [was Re: BSD, MIT [was Re: Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.]]

[Romain Berrendonner]

Le 05/04/2012 20:22, Luis Villa a écrit :
> If the affiliates and board approve of a more active, forward-looking
> role for OSI, then OSI can follow through on what license-discuss
> advises in this thread. If they would prefer to remain in the current,
> filter-only-for-OSD position, then this will have been an interesting
> thought experiment for someone else to build on.

A less controversial way to provide more useful information could be to
provide a license *database* rather than a license *list*, where each
license would be associated with a number of fields, and users would be
allowed to sort licenses as they wish.

Possible fields could be:

* License type : permissive, strong copyleft, weak copyleft;
* License scope : general purpose, special purpose, non-reusable;
* License status : current, superseded, retired
* License creation date;
* License popularity : either using data provided by third parties like
the one named after a dark bird ;), or keys like popular, common,
unusual, etc
* License steward;

Default sorting could feature "current", "popular", "general purpose"
licenses first.

A number of other fields could useful from a technical standpoint:
* Choice of law clause ? yes/no
* Express compatibility clause ? no, or list of compatible licenses
* Patent clause ? none, retaliation, pooling


-- 
Romain