[License-discuss] comprehensiveness (or not) of the OSI-approved list

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 12:30 PM Nicholas Matthew Neft Weinstock
<nweinsto at qti.qualcomm.com> wrote:
[...]

> OSI does not do so with regards to prospective licenses.  It considers other factors besides the published definition.
>
[...]
> OSI’s License Review committee was unable to reach consensus on approving CC0,

The wording in the FAQ you referenced
(https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero) is slightly but meaningfully
different: "the License Review Committee was unable to reach consensus
that it should be approved". Based on what I recall of the discussion,
that seems to be a polite way of saying that there was a quickly
growing consensus that it should be rejected.

> but not because it failed any element of the OSD (https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero).

The sentence "While many open source licenses simply do not mention
patents, it is exceedingly rare for open source licenses to explicitly
disclaim any conveyance of patent rights, and the Committee felt that
approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly
even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of
software released under CC0." was written by an OSI board member
several years ago and may not fully reflect the current view of the
OSI board; I recommend that they review this FAQ.

I am not sure if you are doing this intentionally (I notice you are
writing from a Qualcomm address) but there's nothing in that FAQ that
suggests that CC0, in the views of the participants in that l-r
discussion, did *not* think it failed elements of the OSD. Indeed my
recollection is that some participants in that discussion specifically
pointed to OSD 7 as a basis for nonconformance of CC0 with the OSD.

(I don't necessarily disagree with the main point you were making.)

 Richard