[License-review] Withdrawal of License Submission - Barrer Free Software License (BFSL) formerly BOSL and BSL

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2025, at 13:39, Barrer Software Legal wrote:
> P.S. - To the OSI board: The world has changed since 1998. Maybe it's time your definitions evolved too. When three organizations in one year are trying to do the same thing, that's not a bug in our licenses—it's a feature request for your process.
> 

Respectfully, this is pretty much exactly the same thing that the proponents of 'ethical source' licenses said, and the answer is the same: there is room in the world for more than one category of 'free software' licenses, and the OSD (and by extension the OSI) is just one. The recent OSI board elections included candidates who wanted to promote such ethical source licenses, and the OSI members chose not to move in that direction (by not electing those candidates).

>From a practical point of view, given the numerous examples of existing restrictive licenses (like the GPLv2) being abused by commercial interests without any consequences, creating new categories of licenses which also purport to restrict the behavior of those commercial interests is not likely to accomplish anything other than 'making a statement'. That can be useful for its own purposes, and I'm certain that some number of developers in the world would choose to participate, but that isn't the OSI's role.

In particular, there are already hundreds (if not thousands) of legal contracts in place around the world which refer to "OSI approved licenses" as a category for the purposes of defining acceptable (and not acceptable) software to be included in service offerings and products - changing that definition to include licenses which included either ethical-use or commercial-use restrictions would be very harmful to the community which has been relying on "OSI approval" for decades.

Further discussions on this topic should probably move to the license-discuss list, so I've CCed that list on this reply.
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