(Comment below, I've heavily edited to focus in, please read earlier portions 
of the thread for context)


On Sunday, March 29, 2020 2:06 PM, Henrik Ingo wrote:
On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 10:22 PM Josh Berkus <[email protected] < 
Caution-mailto:[email protected] > > wrote:


1. license does not in fact conform to the OSD (was erroneously approved)

2. does not appear to be used for any currently available/working
software *and is redundant with more popular licenses* (added condition
mine).

I would like to postpone the activity on #2. Let's first focus on licenses that 
have actual problems. Arguably, if a license isn't being used anyway, it cannot 
be an urgent problem.

I'd actually argue the opposite; let's survey the currently approved licenses 
to gather all that do not conform to the OSD first, then sort those from least 
used to most used, and deal with them in that order.  This is advantageous for 
at least the following reasons:

  1.  This is a new process; we're likely to make mistakes while executing it, 
or will discover that the idea of decertification itself is flawed.  Let's 
contain the damage as far as possible during the learning phase.
  2.  We keep hearing about 'license proliferation'.  Focusing in on the rarely 
used 'bad' licenses will help with this.

Note that I believe that the process should only be about licenses that don't 
conform to the OSD; using it as an excuse for pruning back licenses due to 
license proliferation concerns is a terrible abuse of OSI's power.  I 
personally believe that because of how complex the law is (more so due to 
varying jurisdictions) and due to the fact that the law is constantly changing, 
there will always be a need for new licenses.  Thus, for any license that is 
proposed for decertification we should be able to clearly articulate which of 
the OSD principles are being violated, and how they are violated by the 
license.  This reasoning should be annotated to the license in a clearly 
discoverable manner (e.g., each license has its own page), with very specific 
explanations of which license clauses are in violation of the OSD, and why.  
This acts as both a historical record of the reasoning, and a guide to others 
that wish to create new licenses of what not to do in their own language.

Thanks,
Cem Karan
_______________________________________________
The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not 
necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the 
Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.

License-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
  • Re: [License-di... Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA) via License-discuss

Reply via email to