[License-review] License drafting quality and process [was Re: Comment on MOSL and similar licenses]

[Luis Villa]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 01:40:59PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > Richard,
> >
> > > It is probably true that such licenses were a waste of time. I just do
> > > not see why one would assume that consulting an arbitrary attorney
> > > would on average have resulted in something better
> >
> > Mostly just because it requires convincing at least one other person
> > that your license is worth someone's time and/or money before you come here.
> >
> > > Some of the most problematic pseudo or questionably-FLOSS licenses
> > > I've seen over the years clearly *were* drafted with legal help.
> >
> > No question.  If you come up with a way to screen most of those out,
> > too, I'm all ears.
>
> I don't think that category can be screened out (prior to discussion
> on a list like this). I wonder whether the other category could be
> screened out by requiring some threshold number of supporters > 1 (as
> an alternative to the suggestion of getting legal review).

By "supporter" do you mean +1s to this list? A community specific to
the license (such as the one you've created for copyleft-next)? A
functional software community affiliated with/supporting the license
(e.g., as Mozilla/Eclipse did for their licenses)?

I think I had the second or third options in mind with my earlier
proposals, but would be open to discussing the first if people think
that would be fruitful/workable.

Luis