[License-discuss] [License-review] For approval: The Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4)

[Henrik Ingo]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2020 at 6:30 PM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
>> most people out there are rather on the
>> level of "Microsoft will close source Github".
>
>
> I thought Github's software was closed-source already.
>

Yes. That's why it's funny.

>>
>> I remember when Microsoft submitted the MS-PL. Some people who were
>>
>> also vocal in this thread, were strongly against approving it, because
>> although the license was OSD compliant, Microsoft was an evil company.
>> Luckily it was approved, and look at Microsoft's progress since.
>
>
> Perhaps you also remember when I submitted MS-PL and another MS license a few years before.  They were rejected on the perfectly correct process grounds that I could propose them but I couldn't change them if the OSI requested changes (they were too new to fit under the "legacy" category).  I accepted that and withdrew them, but I continued to maintain (in the face of attacks on Groklaw) that the licenses were nevertheless open source, and eventually OSI agreed with me.  I was not intruding on OSI's monopoly on "open source", because it has none.
>

I wasn't very active at the time, so don't remember details. From a
distance I thought it was Microsoft that submitted it.

Thanks for doing it if it was you. It was the right thing to do!

>>
>> There could also be an "open
>> source but not recommended" category for licenses that were approved
>> but only used by 1 or 2 projects/vendors.
>
>
> Some of the existing categories, which were absolute murder to get agreement on, were intended to serve that purpose.  A *lot* of mailing-list participants did *not* want OSI to be in the position of saying "License A is better than license B."  I don't think that's changed.  Of course, anyone else can set up a license wizard that does make such recommendations.

I know. I personally don't have a strong opinion one way or another.
It's fairly easy to statistically show a small set of licenses are
used for like 99% of software, and the top 3 - 5 probably cover
something like 60-90 %. But if people get upset when the license with
their fingerprints doesn't get included, OSI can also keep a neutral
alphabetized list. What I don't think makes sense is to keep an
alphabetized list and then argue that we can't approve new licenses
because list is too long.

henrik
-- 
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