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

[McCoy Smith]

>>From: License-review <license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Luis Villa
>>Sent: Thursday, January 2, 2020 7:27 AM
>>To: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at lists.opensource.org>
>>Subject: Re: [License-review] For approval: The Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4)

 

>>On Wed, Jan 1, 2020 at 6:29 PM Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org <mailto:bkuhn at ebb.org> > wrote:

I can't find an example when OSI approved a novel copyleft license that
hadn't yet been used in practice and therefore had no track record of use
for any FOSS project. 

 

>>Of course, OSI and many allies will scream bloody murder (arguably with reason!) if any project uses an unapproved license and claims to be open source. And no project wants to deal with that; it’s >>unpleasant personally, bad PR for the project, etc., etc. 

 

>>If we’re going to add yet another unwritten rule to the long list of unwritten rules we might as well just simplify by saying “OSI’s rule is that only FSF gets to advance the state of the art in copyleft, >>everyone else is stuck in a vast set of catch-22s that are impossible to simultaneously satisfy”.

 

>>Luis

 

I’m with Luis on this.  If you’re not going to modify or clarify the OSD, you at least ought to specify in the guidelines for license approval submissions that there are other factors that will be examined in the process of evaluating whether a license ought to be on the list (for example, I think “legal soundness” has always been a criteria, although perhaps the guidance that you must specify “Legal review: Describe any legal review the license has been through, and provide results of any legal analysis if available” hints at that (although it seems often to be ignored in submissions)).  If there are other factors (like “describe your business model” “describe the projects using the license already” “describe whether other entities (like FSF) have acknowledged the license as a free software license”) people ought to at least know that that’s part of the review process.  It might even cut down on the volume of submissions to let people know that these factors will also be evaluated.

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