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

[Christopher Sean Morrison]

> On May 22, 2019, at 11:00 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> 
> And so OSI should educate you that patents are sometimes very important, and that the BSD license is currently not very useful in the open source environment. It is risky!

Has this actually been tested and/or demonstrated yet anywhere?  Surely with the tens of thousands of permissive-licensed codes in use in every corporate portfolio, one of them would have endured a test by now if it were risky.  Regardless, not knowing whether something is risky doesn’t make it risky, it makes it an unknown risk.  Baseless fear-mongering.

Reminds me of old pediatric guidelines that used to recommend avoiding exposure to peanuts in children's' first few years for fear that it “might” increase risk of allergy.  In reality, it was an unknown risk.  Studies later proved exposure was not risky, and peanut avoidance increased allergy risk (significantly).

PBsd&J sandwiches are delicious and simple.  I’ll happily continue to recommend them until there’s actualized evidence against that is relatable.  Even if someone determined they don’t convey an implicit grant, and that’s a big if, it’ll still take one heck of a precedent for it to imply a reasonable concern for 99.999% of the developer population.  It might give pause if my organization had super deep pockets and wasn’t a government.

Cheers!
Sean

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20190523/5c890720/attachment.html>