WebM license third-party submission

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi, Chris--

On May 26, 2010, at 9:42 AM, Chris DiBona wrote:
> Please hold off on submitting this while we determine certain compatibility
> issues internally at google. We'll engage with osi in a couple of weeks,
> likely as not.  

In the past, the OSI held off reviewing the Microsoft PL & CL until Microsoft's submission of them by Jon Rosenburg-- at the time, the considerations were "is there code out there using the license", and "is the person submitting the license in a position to make changes based upon feedback from the review process".  

So, I don't have a concern in holding off on a discussion of the WebM license for a period of time.  (On the other hand, if there are issues, it's better to resolve them before one starts having lots of people doing stuff with WebM-licensed code....)

> I would also point out that we're uncomfortable with make
> license proliferation worse and in the event we do submit it, we will want a
> couple of changes to how OSI does licenses.
> 
> 1) We will likely want a label explicitly deterring the use of the license.
> 2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We
> are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
> 
> This might sound strident, but I think that OSI needs to be more open about
> its workings to retain credibility in the space.

There are several points here mixed together.

I don't recall the OSI board of directors ever making license approval or rejection decisions which did not substantially  reflect the public discussion/review process on this list.  However, I certainly don't have any objection to the notion that the OSI BOD discussion for WebM and/or all other licenses be public.

With regard to license proliferation concerns, the best way would be to adopt an already-existing license which is fully LGPL / GPLv2 / GPLv3 miscible rather than roll your own.  If you do need to create a new license, starting with a BSD or MIT permissive license at least minimizes the issues with license proliferation.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck