[License-discuss] "Fairness" vs. mission objectives

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Hear hear! I recently had to grant an internal exception to allow
contributions to Vim because "The Vim License" is not an OSI-approved
license. I have no doubt that it would be approved were it to be
submitted, but it has not been as far as I can tell and is unlikely to
ever be.

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 2:56 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 2:18 PM VanL <van.lindberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On the flip side, I think there should be an affirmative effort to certify licenses - such as those identified via the SPDX project - even without affirmative submission. Most of them will not be controversial. We want to reach a world in which we have looked at all the source-available licenses and made a determination as to their OSD conformance. This strengthens the OSD as a tool for measuring licenses.
>
> Agreed! In theory I suppose the "legacy approval" process could be
> used for this, but it has depended on someone taking the initiative to
> submit a license for approval and has been invoked only rarely. I
> would love to see the OSI recognize some category of certification for
> the hundreds of licenses in actual active use in, for example, Linux
> distributions, more often than not simple legacy noncopyleft licenses
> from the 1980s and 1990s, which uncontroversially meet OSD/software
> freedom criteria but which would likely never be submitted for
> approval by a (typically nonexistent) license steward, or which would
> have traditionally been discouraged on anti-proliferation grounds. Far
> better than focusing on so-called "crayon" and thought-experiment
> licenses, which until relatively recently characterized a lot of the
> submissions to license-review.
>
> Richard
>
>
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