Re: [License-discuss] Moderator Advice

[Simon Phipps]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Rick Moen <r...@linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lro...@rosenlaw.com)i, who I think was
> addressing this question to Simon Phipps:
>
> > I dislike mailman defaults. Why are you moderating my emails at all?
> > Or John Cowan's? Or Henrik Ingo's?
>
> I think there's some confusion here caused by inexact wording and the
> word 'moderated' having overloaded meanings:
>

I now regret expending volunteer effort trying to help Mr Rosen & others
avoid delays getting their deep wisdom disseminated.


> Simon Philpps (part of a group of OSI listadmins) mentioned having to
> appprove several recent postings from the listadmin queue that were held
> because of 'too many recipients'.  The Mailman default setting for this
> item ('Ceiling on acceptable number of recipients for a posting', on
> page Privacy Options, Recipient Filters) is 10, though in practice the
> filter seems to trigger on a slightly lower number of recipients.
>
> I infer that Simon, when he spoke of having to 'moderate through'
> postings, meant merely ones that landed in the listadmin queue.  He was
> quite correctly and very benignly giving people advice on how to avoid
> the admin queue.
>
> license-discuss appears to not set any subscriber's 'moderated' flag by
> default -- which again is GNU Mailman's default configuration.  So, I
> strongly suspect that you (Lawrence), and John, and Henrik, do _not_
> have that flag set.  (IMO:) Smart list administration, like smart system
> administration, aspires to automate, to limit manual exception-handling to
> a bare minimum.
>

Exactly, thanks for the explanation.

S.
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[License-discuss] Moderator Advice

[Simon Phipps]

I just moderated through a set of messages that were all held by an
anti-spam rule because they had too many recipients in To/Cc. Please avoid
cross-posting to avoid this.

Thanks,

Simon
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Re: [License-discuss] Possible alternative was: Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) Version 0.4.1

[Simon Phipps]

Hi Richard,

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:37 PM, Richard Fontana 
wrote:

> I really like the approach as it currently exists. But why is use of
> CC0 necessary? If some work of the US government is in the public
> domain by virtue of the Copyright Act, there is no need to use
> CC0. Indeed, I would think use of CC0 by the Government is just as
> problematic, or non-problematic, as the use of any open source
> license, such as the Apache License 2.0. Strictly speaking, the use of
> CC0 assumes that you have copyright ownership.
>

I may be misunderstanding, but I had understood that the effect of the
Copyright Act only affected the USA and that outside the USA the status of
government works is not reliably determined. As such I would expect a
license like CC0 to be necessary to give people outside the USA certainty
as to their rights regarding government works.


>
> Only noting this because the fact that OSI has not approved CC0 makes
> this more complicated than the case where CC0 is not used at all.
>

I realise CC has resource constraints but I would love to see this
revisited.

Regards

Simon
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Re: [License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: OSI equivalent

[Simon Phipps]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 5:00 PM, Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) <
cem.f.karan@mail.mil> wrote:

> > -Original Message-
> > From: John Sullivan [mailto:jo...@fsf.org]
> > Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2017 10:10 AM
> > To: Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) 
> > Cc: license-discuss@opensource.org
> > Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: OSI equivalent
> >
> > "Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US)" 
> > writes:
> >
> > > --===0423943140736445875==
> > > Content-Language: en-US
> > > Content-Type: multipart/signed; protocol="application/x-pkcs7-
> signature";
> > > micalg=SHA1; boundary="=_NextPart_000_00EE_01D28833.18234540"
> > >
> > > --=_NextPart_000_00EE_01D28833.18234540
> > > Content-Type: text/plain;
> > > charset="utf-8"
> > > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> > >
> > > Beyond that, is the FSF interested in compatibility between non-FSF
> > > licenses?
> > > That is, if MIT and Apache 2.0 happened to be incompatible with one
> > > another, would FSF care provided they were both compatible with the
> > > GPL?  In my opinion, OSI is supposed to be more neutral on the
> > > matters, and therefore should care more about such situations.
> > >
> >
> > I can't immediately picture the specific situation you're talking about,
> but
> > in general we do care. For one thing because we recommend
> > other licenses depending on the situation (see
> > Caution-https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.en.html).
> >
> > We also do support all free software, not just GPLed or even just
> copyleft
> > free software. Our licens...@fsf.org team answers questions
> > that have to do with other licenses in both their correspondence with the
> > community and in our compliance work.
>
> OK, so FSF is willing to take this on for OSI?  Will OSI defer to FSF on
> this?
> Ideally there will always be one canonical source of information for
> license
> compatibility so that there isn't any confusion.
>

As was mentioned earlier in the thread, the "compatibility" of licenses is
a context-specific matter, so the concept of canonical abstract
compatibility information seems nonsensical in the general case.

As the author of the GPL family of licenses the FSF is a great source of
advice on the combinability of other licenses with theirs, although the
only opinion that really matters is that of the copyright holder who has
chosen to use a particular license. For other license combinations, I would
not expect the FSF to volunteer as an authority and doubt their third-party
view would be sought.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] OSI equivalent

[Simon Phipps]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 9:17 PM, David Woolley 
wrote:

> On 15/02/17 16:58, Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) wrote:
>
>> Does OSI have a license compatibility chart for the various approved
>> licenses?
>>
>
> I would have thought that any such document would constitute legal advice,
> which is illegal for half the list members to provide, and the other half
> would only provide in the context of their specific client's circumstances.


There are certainly list members who are keen for us all to believe that
without too much question.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] Views on React licensing?

[Simon Phipps]

One observation on this whole topic.

The OSD is a checklist for evaluating licenses as open source, rather than
a guide to the available freedoms of the software to which it is applied,
even if in most cases those are close to the same thing.

To Larry's raising of OSD 7: it has to be taken in that light. OSD 7 deals
with the situation where a license might have effects predicated on
completion of a licensing process elsewhere. For example, a license that
required completion of an NDA, or the securing of a support agreement, or
compliance with a trademark license, should not pass OSD 7.  But license
terms applied after the fact are surely outside the scope of the approval
process?

If OSI wants to get into the business of certifying that software is open
source, rather than that licenses are, it will need a new process...

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] AFL/OSL/NOSL 3.0

[Simon Phipps]

That page is linked from http://opensource.org/licenses/AFL-3.0 Larry (at
the bottom) and no other narrative. What is the specific change you are
requesting?

S.


On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 6:00 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lro...@rosenlaw.com> wrote:

> Open Source friends,
>
> I discovered in the past few days on other lists that there are several
> misleading descriptions of my AFL/OSL/NOSL 3.0 licenses on FSF and OSI
> websites. Neither site bothered to publish my own description of these
> licenses, and their own characterizations are incorrect.
>
> Please see this: http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm.
>
> I would appreciate it if FSF and OSI would copy this document to their own
> websites instead of inventing their own.
>
> Best regards, /Larry
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Mark Wielaard [mailto:m...@klomp.org]
> Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 12:32 AM
> To: License submissions for OSI review <license-rev...@opensource.org>
> Subject: Re: [License-review] Approval: BSD + Patent License
>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:03:33AM -0800, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> > McCoy is proposing a BSD license plus patent license. It is an okay
> > FOSS license. But AFL 3.0 did that very thing 10 years ago. The only
> > reason for AFL 3.0 not being accepted generally for that same purpose
> > is the FSF's complaint, "contains contract provisions." That kind of
> > quasi-legal balderdash is directly relevant to what McCoy and others
> > want to do.
> >
> > And if AFL 3.0 isn't satisfactory for some random reason, then use the
> > Apache 2.0 license.
>
> Sorry Larry, but these are impractical suggestions wrt reviewing the
> license submission and intent of the BSD + Patent License. The AFLv3 is GPL
> incompatible because it contains contract provisions requiring distributors
> to obtain the express assent of recipients to the license terms. The extra
> restrictions making ASLv2 incompatible with GPLv2 have already been
> discussed. Both are clearly documented cases of expressly incompatible
> licenses by the GPL license steward the FSF. I understand your desire to
> mention your disagreement with the license steward and discuss alternative
> legal interpretations of what it means to be compatible with the GPL then
> what might be generally accepted and used in practice. But it is offtopic
> and not a very constructive discussion in the context of this license
> submission, which doesn't contain any of those extra restrictions.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark
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Re: [License-discuss] CDDL 1.0 vs. 1.1

[Simon Phipps]

Sun never bothered to request approval for 1.1 as the lawyers involved
regarded the changes as trivial.

S.


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 3:25 PM, Mike Milinkovich <
mike.milinkov...@eclipse.org> wrote:

>
> I note that Glassfish uses CDDL 1.1
> <https://glassfish.java.net/public/CDDL+GPL_1_1.html>, but that all
> references on the OSI website are to CDDL 1.0
> <http://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0>.
>
> Does anyone know the reason why there is this version mismatch? Did
> something fall through the cracks here, or is there some longer story?
>
> --
> Mike Milinkovich
> mike.milinkov...@eclipse.org
>
>
>
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Re: [License-discuss] Does adding this condition to the MIT license make it non-OSI compliant or non-compatible with GPL / LGPL?

[Simon Phipps]

Not OSD compatible.
On 6 Dec 2015 8:56 p.m., "Marc Laporte"  wrote:

> Hi!
>
> bpmn-js is a BPMN 2.0 diagram modeling and rendering toolkit.
>
> The license is here:
> https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js/blob/master/LICENSE
>
> which is the MIT license with the addition of:
> "The source code responsible for displaying the bpmn.io logo (two
> green cogwheels in a box) that links back to http://bpmn.io as part of
> rendered diagrams MUST NOT be removed or changed."
>
>
> My questions:
>
> Is this still OSI compliant?
> Is it compatible with GPL / LGPL?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Marc Laporte
>
> https://suite.tiki.org/Tiki+Suite
> http://Avan.Tech
> http://MarcLaporte.com
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Re: [License-discuss] BSD 3-clause and copyright notices

[Simon Phipps]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 2:27 PM, Zluty Sysel  wrote:

> The problem comes with acknowledging the usage of this codebase in
> binary distributions. Some of the future users of this source code are
> also our current customers, and some of these customers do not want to
> reveal that they are using our particular libraries for their (binary
> distributed) product. Given this, let me rephrase: Can we allow these
> customers not to reproduce the BSD license text even if our AUTHORS
> file contains names and email addresses of people outside of our
> company? Because that's really all we're after here, allowing certain
> customers not to have to mention that they are using our libraries.
>

I would not recommend changing the license itself as that would require OSI
approval as a new license, but if that is the only issue, and reproducing
the copyright notices of later contributors who do not also make a waiver
is not really the obstacle, perhaps you could add an additional notice
along the lines of
"As a special additional right, <$company> grants all licensees of its
copyright under the above license the right to distribute binary versions
without reproducing their copyright notices per clause 2. We also encourage
(but do not require) later contributors to make the same waiver."

IANAL, TINLA etc.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] Proposal: Apache Third Party License Policy

[Simon Phipps]

[Removing cross-posting]

It's hard to see why this Apache-specific discussion is being redirected to
OSI's mailing list and I suggest we end the conversation unless there is a
specific and well-defined question for us to answer.

Thanks,

Simon
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Re: [License-discuss] Strong and weak copyleft

[Simon Phipps]

It looks like you may consider LGPL to be a weak copyleft license; my
apologies if you don't!  But if you do...

I do not believe the LGPL to be a weak copyleft license. Strong
copyleft implies that the scope of the required reciprocity is the source
needed to create the distributed binary, while weak copyleft implies that
scope to be the altered source file alone. The LGPL requirements, like
those of the GPL, are scoped at the distributed binary, but there is a
restriction to what constitutes the distributed binary.

Thus I refer to LGPL as scope-limited strong copyleft and discourage
clients from regarding it as weak copyleft. Treating LGPL as weak copyleft
is a dangerous thing to do as, in the absence of conditions to make the
limitation of scope apply, LGPL has all the same consequences as GPL.

S.


On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Ben Tilly bti...@gmail.com wrote:

 I believe that the legal key is distribution of the licensed code, not
 linking to it.

 The LGPL defines a Combined Work and has requirements on what is
 required when you distribute a combined work together.  The intent is
 clearly that if you distribute the combined work together and DO NOT
 meet those conditions, then you had no permission to distribute the
 LGPLed code.  And this has force because while the proprietary half of
 a combined work is not a derived work, you still need permission to
 distribute some else's copyrighted code and that permission was
 contingent on what you did with your application.

 The GPL defines a covered work to be, either the unmodified Program
 or a work based on the Program.  Later in the license a distinction
 is drawn between that and mere aggregation.  The intent is that
 distributing your program + the covered GPLed code it depends on
 creates a work and you need GPL permission to have distributed the
 covered GPLed code.  (Whether a judge will agree with this
 interpretation is another question, but I'm pretty sure that the
 license drafters intended a judge to understand it this way.)

 With that said, the LGPL gives a lot of license flexibility for your
 part of the combined work but says you must allow reverse engineering.
 Which by default is allowed in many places, but is something that many
 proprietary licenses take away.  By contrast the GPL offers no real
 alternative but to license the code you own under the GPL.  Therefore
 LGPLed code keeps itself copylefted but does not encourage developers
 to GPL their own code.  While GPLed code pushes people who want to use
 that code to have to GPL the code that they wrote.

 On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Lawrence Rosen lro...@rosenlaw.com
 wrote:
  Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz referred me to this thought-provoking link:
 
 
 
 
 https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/eupl/news/meaning-%E2%80%9Ccopyleft%E2%80%9D-eupl
 
 
 
  Can anyone here precisely identify the language in the GPL licenses that
  makes it strong rather than weak copyleft? And can anyone here
 identify
  anything in copyright law or cases that allow this distinction in the
  meaning of derivative work?
 
 
 
  /Larry
 
 
 
 
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Re: [License-discuss] 3-clause BSD with additional clause forbidding key disclosure

[Simon Phipps]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Zluty Sysel zluty.sy...@gmail.com wrote:


 The issue however is that there is a certain reluctance not to include
 this in the source code license, since one of the .c files contains a
 very distinct placeholder (set to NULL) for the Private Key in it. The
 clause in the license would serve as a reminder that those Private
 Keys (which sometimes are shared across all employees of a single
 company) are not redistributable even when the source code contains
 one (albeit a NULL development one). Since Private Keys are
 distributed in a fashion that makes it difficult for them to be
 attached to a license, the company wants to include this in each
 source code file so that users do not inadvertently commit to public
 repos with the Private Key set.


Surely this is a matter to handle via a 1:1 contract with your customer?  I
have doubts that the additional restriction you are proposing is
OSD-compliant.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on why standard licenses?

[Simon Phipps]

Care to propose an improvement?


On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 7:37 PM, lro...@rosenlaw.com lro...@rosenlaw.comwrote:

 Standard is a loaded term. Licenses are not standards and OSI is not a
 standards organization.  Larry


 Sent from my smartphone


  Original message 
 From: Luis Villa
 Date:04/27/2014 6:11 PM (GMT-08:00)
 To: License Discuss
 Subject: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on why
 standard licenses?

 Hi, all-

 A few of us were talking and realized the FAQ/website have nothing to
 explain why *using standard licenses* is a good idea. This being a sort of
 basic point, I started remedying the problem :)

 Draft FAQ entry addressing the question is here:
 http://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Projects/Why+standardized+licensing%3F

 There is also an incomplete potential more-than-FAQ answer that could be
 put somewhere on opensource.org. The more I think about it, the more I
 think the FAQ may be sufficient, but I'd be curious what others here think
 and whether something longer is worthwhile.

 Feedback is probably better on-wiki but the list is fine too. :)
 Luis

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Re: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on why standard licenses?

[Simon Phipps]

I don't think that's the point of the entry Luis is constructing. He's
using the word standardized as a term of speech rather than as a
technical term.

Mind you, OSI has described itself as a standards body for open source
licenses for a long time, see http://opensource.org/about (I believe that
text used to be on the home page).

S.


On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Lawrence Rosen lro...@rosenlaw.com wrote:

 How about OSI Approved license? That's what you do.


 Simon Phipps webm...@opensource.org wrote:

 Care to propose an improvement?


 On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 7:37 PM, lro...@rosenlaw.com 
 lro...@rosenlaw.comwrote:

 Standard is a loaded term. Licenses are not standards and OSI is not a
 standards organization.  Larry


  Original message 
 From: Luis Villa
 Date:04/27/2014 6:11 PM (GMT-08:00)
 To: License Discuss
 Subject: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on
 why standard licenses?

 Hi, all-

 A few of us were talking and realized the FAQ/website have nothing to
 explain why *using standard licenses* is a good idea. This being a sort of
 basic point, I started remedying the problem :)

 Draft FAQ entry addressing the question is here:
 http://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Projects/Why+standardized+licensing%3F

 There is also an incomplete potential more-than-FAQ answer that could be
 put somewhere on opensource.org. The more I think about it, the more I
 think the FAQ may be sufficient, but I'd be curious what others here think
 and whether something longer is worthwhile.

 Feedback is probably better on-wiki but the list is fine too. :)
 Luis


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Re: [License-discuss] [Osi] [General enquiries] Dual License for CC0

[Simon Phipps]

On 3 Apr 2014 00:59, John Cowan co...@mercury.ccil.org wrote:

 Wilson, Andrew scripsit:

  Interesting point, though.  I'd speculate that if the embedded
  public license fallback inside CC0 is ever sent to OSI as a
  stand-alone license, it would be approved.  It is mighty similar
  in effect to MIT/BSD/Apache, with the distinctive feature that it
  explicitly disclaims patent licensing, is clearly copyright-only,
  and therefore non-duplicative.

 I thought that was precisely why we rejected it.


As I recall it was withdrawn by CC before we were forced to consider
whether its explicit removal of any implied patent protection was in fact a
breach of the OSD.

S.
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Re: [License-discuss] Illumina Open Source License

[Simon Phipps]

Thanks for the question. I agree with the other comments here and have
submitted an issue to the project on Github.

S.


On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Albert Vilella avile...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 I have been trying to wrap my head around the following license, and
 discussed the contents of it with colleagues. There seems to be two
 markedly opposed opinions around the license. This is, people that
 think it's OSI-compliant, and people that think it's nothing close to
 being OSI-compliant:


 http://github.com/sequencing/isaac_aligner/blob/master/General_Illumina_Open_Source_License_Template_1_Final.pdf?raw=true

 Although I don't have anything against the license itself, I am
 personally curious to see how it does when reviewed in this mailing
 list. Specifically, I would like to see if there are any impediments
 for software under this license to be packaged for Debian.

 Thanks in advance,

 Albert.

 Disclaimer: these thoughts and opinions are my own, and not that of my
 employer.
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Re: [License-discuss] [Infrastructure] Machine readable source of OSI approved licenses?

[Simon Phipps]

This sounds useful and I'd support the idea if a group were willing to make
it happen. I suggest a staged implementation with the Popular Licenses
being made available first and the others set up to return a placeholder
message or error.


On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Joe Murray joe.mur...@jmaconsulting.bizwrote:

 Would it be possible for OSI to make available a machine readable list of
 the licenses approved by OSI? The format - a csv, xml or some other file in
 a repository, or a REST or some other service from opensource.org - is
 not as important as that the content be authoritative. There may be an
 official specification for how software licenses should be made available,
 but I am not aware of it. http://spdx.org/licenses/ provides a list of
 licenses but it too is not designed for automated use (though it might be
 scrapable). Ideally, it seems like the recognition of licenses by OSI
 should produce some output that could be used by SPDX tools, but this
 request is a bit simpler.

 Background:
 CiviCRM would like the set of licenses in this form in order to ensure
 that any extensions that we list on civicrm.org and provide auto-download
 services for via civicrm.org are using licenses approved by OSI. However,
 the request seems of broader interest. Karl Fogel suggested I pose it to
 these two lists.

 CiviCRM decided to try to up its game with respect to licensing of its
 extensions partly as a result of someone coming across
 http://www.zdnet.com/github-improves-open-source-licensing-polices-718213/.
 While early on most civicrm.org listed extensions were hosted on
 drupal.org and thus were guaranteed to have a GPL license, now most of
 our new listings are for software on github. CiviCRM would also like to
 'assist' extension developers in actually including an accurate license
 text file in their extension by checking it is present in the extension's
 root directory and that its text matches what they are listing as the
 license. I've been asked to liaise with OSI on the availability of such a
 machine readable list of these licenses.

 Possible implementation strategy:
 If OSI decides it would like to do this, it may be technically as simple
 as copying the licenses on opensource.org from one type of node to
 another, then doing a bit of cleanup to support some requirements for
 automated use. Looking at opensource.org, I see a content type was at
 some point created specifically for licenses, though no content has been
 posted of that type, and all the licenses are currently created as nodes
 with content type=page.

 In terms of fields for automated use, it would be useful to move the short
 title into its own field rather than having it in parentheses at the end of
 the long title, and to make a plain text version of licenses suitable for
 inclusion as a LICENSE.txt file in source code available in addition to the
 current html formatted ones. If the approved licenses on opensource.orgwere 
 put into suitable content types, they could easily be made available
 as a feed or exported periodically to a file that could be stored in an
 authoritative repository.

 I am also trying to understand the proper way to handle headers in license
 files, particularly for the small number of cases where they make a
 difference, eg GPL-3.0 versus GPL-3.0+ (see
 http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto, and the differences
 between the 'How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs' sections of
 http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0 and http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+).
 This seems like something we want to assist developers in getting right by
 using reasonable defaults. One possibility we are mulling over is
 optionally automating the creation of a LICENSE.txt file using metadata
 about the Author, publication date, and license and suggesting that authors
 use that file in their repo or request a manual review of their
 LICENSE.txt. It would be convenient if suggested header text for licenses
 was made available in machine readable form from OSI, including for the
 differences between 'version x only' and 'version x or later' headers.

 I am willing to volunteer with doing some of the implementation work if a
 decision is made to provide this new service.

 Joe Murray, PhD
 President, JMA Consulting
 joe.mur...@jmaconsulting.biz
 skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
 416.466.1281

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Re: [License-discuss] Proposal to revise (and move?) the CC0 FAQ

[Simon Phipps]

On Thursday, November 14, 2013, Richard Fontana wrote:

 On Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:46:22 -0800
 Luis Villa l...@lu.is javascript:; wrote:

  Hey, all-
  I was just looking at the FAQ entry on CC0, and two things jump out:
 
 1. It's extremely odd that we have a FAQ entry about one particular
 rejected license, and no others. I would recommend removing this
  FAQ entry on that grounds.

 I am inclined to agree. John Cowan has said that this is in fact a
 frequently asked question - is that the impression of anyone else?


I'm not sure it is a question frequently asked of OSI, but the impression
CC0 must be an OK open source license is common in my experience.



  Tangentially, as I pointed out earlier on
  this list, we probably should maintain a list of rejected licenses,
  and the reasons for their rejections, so that future license authors
  (and license-review members!) can refer to those precedents in a
  useful, non-mythological, manner.

 +1. Although:

 2. Whether the CC0 entry stays in the FAQ or moves to a list of
  rejected licenses,

 CC0 was not rejected per se: it was withdrawn before the OSI board had
 an opportunity to vote on it. (How many licenses have been 'rejected'
 in any official sense?)

  if it stays anywhere on the site, it should be
  rewritten to make it neutral and historically accurate; it is neither
  of those things right now. Any takers? If not, I'll get to it
  eventually, but I'd love for someone else to tackle it.

 I am not sure there should be a specific FAQ entry on CC0. Maybe one
 unified question and answer on public domain dedications that notes the
 history around CC0.


I don't favour a list of rejected licenses for just this reason, but I do
favour a better rendition of our institutional memory so that people
seeking the history of approval of licenses like CC0 or TrueCrypt can
easily find the answer without needing to digest the full archives for the
two licensing mailing lists.

What's needed is an indexed activity catalogue for license approval at OSI.
Perhaps we could raise a work group to prepare such a thing?

S.



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[License-discuss] Moderator note

[Simon Phipps]

I've just cleared the moderation backlog again. List members should note
that e-mail with multiple recipients on cc may trigger moderation even if
you are a list member, and you may wish to trim the list of addressees if
you are responding to a long thread.

S.
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