[License-discuss] comprehensiveness (or not) of the OSI-approved list [was Re: [License-review] For Legacy Approval: LBNL BSD]

[Henrik Ingo]

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 4:08 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 4:48 AM Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:
>
> > - According to many imprecise metrics, 99% of all open source software
> > in the world is covered by a list of about 20 licenses
> > (https://web.archive.org/web/20190115063327/https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source-licenses)
> > - OSI list is 82 licenses, plus 15 retired or superceded licenses. So
> > it follows that this covers way more than 99% of open source software
> > ever written.
> > - Naturally there will be a lot more licenses that also do comply with
> > the OSD. Especially if they are trivial variations of an approved
> > license.
> > - When we say that software is only open source if released with an
> > OSI approved license, it really comes with this rounding error that
> > 0,0..1% of software exists that is also open source. In practical
> > terms this is small enough that it is not worth to mention separately,
> > rather the "fundamenalist" statement is close enough.
>
> But very often -- at least in the traditional Linux distribution
> universe I spend a lot of time in -- non-OSI-approved legacy
> (generally non-copyleft) licenses appear *within* packages that are
> portrayed or at least popularly conceived as being under another
> license, whether that's a copyleft or noncopyleft license.
>
> I think the value of 'mass legacy approval' might be to address the
> criticism I've seen of the OSI apparently claiming that non-approved
> licenses are not open source or validly referred to as open source
> when no one could credibly argue that they are not open source. It
> would also address my concerns about Van's interpretation. But I'm not
> sure whether the effort would be justified.

Note that distros and OSI have different motivations here. For a
distro there is value in actively pulling in some code, because it
provides some functionality that makes the distro better and provides
value to users. The distro then has a process for determining that the
added code can be considered open source. (And in many cases also a
process for adding non-free code via a clearly separate channel.) OSI
process otoh is based on someone being bothered to first submit the
license to OSI. So the motivation starts at an external source.

>From this it quite naturally follows that I would expect the list of
licenses in distros to always be a superset of the OSI list. In fact,
the opposite world doesn't make sense: OSI wouldn't approve licenses
that nobody is using.

A specific recent example was the (mailing list) rejection of the
libpng license. It was rejected as a bad license, even if it probably
is open source. In this situation it is natural that distros continue
to ship libpng. The goals for OSI and distros are different.

My argument in the quoted email was that OSIs list is rather
comprehensive and it is indeed not worth the effort to chase the long
tail of still unapproved licenses. But from this email one might
conclude that if we wanted to pursue that, an approach that aligns
with existing processes would be for the distros to come together and
submit a batch of (hopefully short) licenses for OSI to approve.

henrik



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