[License-review] NOSA 2.0 - 'Up or Down' vote

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

Richard,

Are you also going to ask about asymmetry with permissive upstream and
copyleft downstream?  This was an action item from the UCL license
discussion.

It should be conveyed that no one else apparently had significant issue
with NOSA 2.0 and it is a special purpose license for government use.  I
believe that more people recommended approval (more than 1) than rejection
(1). I don¹t believe that you convinced anyone else that NOSA v2 violated
OSD or that it would require ³substantial revision² to do so.

This is not the same thing as being unable to achieve a consensus view or
a failure of the review process to adjudicate complex licenses.  That you
disagreed with NASA¹s interpretation of 51 USC 20141 is not a failure of
the process or indication that the license is too complex for the needs of
the Government Open Source Software (GOSS) community.

I would ask that the review process be amended that licenses automatically
go to an up or down vote within 6 months of submission unless further
delay is requested by the submitter and that the recommendation to the
board as to the opinion of this list be as transparent as possible and in
the format that Luis used in his reports.

Regards,

Nigel



On 1/5/17, 3:57 PM, "License-review on behalf of Richard Fontana"
<license-review-bounces at opensource.org on behalf of
fontana at opensource.org> wrote:

>As some know, NOSA 2.0 [1] has been languishing in a limbo review
>state for an extremely long time.
>
>In my opinion, NOSA 2.0 is, in its current form, an overly complex and
>badly drafted license. I cannot gain enough confidence that it meets
>the letter and spirit of the Open Source Definition, without
>substantial revision, which the license steward seems disinclined to
>undertake. This is just my view and does not reflect any sort of
>consensus view, although I am not sure one could really demonstrate a
>consensus view on the other side. (It should be noted that Luis Villa,
>a former OSI board member and one of my personal heroes, actually did
>recommend early on that the OSI approve NOSA 2.0, but this never went
>to a vote. [2])
>
>The reason I kept the review alive, in some sense, is twofold. I
>thought that we could somehow use this forum to collectively revise
>the license, but that did not work, in part because of the high
>complexity of the license. (This forum is by contrast not too bad at
>dealing with the more typical shorter, simpler license texts.) I also
>believed for a long time that it was contrary to de facto OSI policy
>to reject a license outright, as opposed to gently directing the
>license submitter to go back to the drawing board. I later discovered
>that outright license rejection, though it seems to have been uncommon
>if it occurred at all in the past several years, was sometimes done
>earlier in the OSI's history.
>
>A number of people, including the license steward and submitter, have
>asked at various times out of understandable frustration that there be
>an 'up or down' vote on NOSA 2.0 rather than a continuation of the
>current situation. There is an OSI board meeting next Wednesday. I
>will place the 'up or down' vote on the agenda, and (with reluctance)
>I will recommend that the vote be 'down' out of concern for the
>integrity of the OSD and the license approval process. It is
>conceivable that the OSI board will wish to treat NOSA 2.0 in some
>manner other than 'up or down' though.
>
>If anyone has comments on NOSA 2.0 that they'd like the OSI board to
>consider please provide them before next Wednesday.
>
>Richard
>
>[1] See e.g.:
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2013-June/001944.htm
>l
>(original submission)
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-June/002177.htm
>l
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-December/002296
>.html
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-September/00247
>8.html
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-February/002716
>.html
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-February/thread
>.html
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-February/002718
>.html
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-March/002721.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-March/002722.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-March/002723.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-March/002724.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-March/002731.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-April/002735.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-April/002737.ht
>ml
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2016-April/002736.ht
>ml
>
>[2] 
>https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2013-October/001999.
>html
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