I've moved this to license-discuss because I'm not sure this is part of discussion of any licence being evaluated, any more. I could be wrong (and am certainly not criticising upthread posts).
Quoting Luis Villa (l...@lu.is): > Again, OSI would be well-served by actually writing down the non-OSD > criteria, or publicly admitting that the criteria are not agreed-to and > non-transparent. I realize this would not be easy, but the current > situation benefits no one. When you say 'the non-OSD criteria', this assumes there is a set the Board (and most outside commmenters?) would agree on. That might be true or might not. The set Bruce adduced on license-review strike me as capturing points most often mentioned. Let's suppose that set were listed on https://opensource.org/approval with framing like 'OSI's Board cannot guarantee that the License Review community will be interested in and comment on your license. Reasons participating individuals have cited for disinterest in some past licenses include perception that the license is a vanity license or duplicative, that it is needlessly specific to one business entity, that it is unjustifiably opaque or ambiguous in its wording, that it was not drafted with a lawyer's review or has legal flaws suggesting legal review was inadequate or unheeded, that it is essentially unused by significant amounts of current software and appears unlikely to beecome so, that it unduly burdens use by developers, business, or end-users, or that it increases license proliferation and the complexity of the resulting combinatorial license matrix without adequate compensating merit. All of these criteria are judgement calls be individual participants, and end up mattering to those individuals (the License Review Chair, OSI's Board, and outside participants) irrespective of their being entirely informal and outside the OSD's wording. At other times, otherwise frequent commenters may withhold comment because they lack specialized expertise, or just aren't interested. Please note, too, that individual participants tend to be unswayed by the argument that you assembled your license using bits and pieces of previously approved license, if those other concerns apply in their view.'[1] Ask yourself, is that really an improvement? (Even imaginaing better wordsmithing than mine, I have doubts.) In my experience, submitters invariably think such judgements are wrong in _their_ cases or should be set aside for their benefit. Also, these really _are_ judgement calls: For example, license-review has appeared to take seriously, over the last few years, a number of permissive licenses I considered lacking any reasonable purpose. Other regulars obviously have greater patience in that area. So, whose non-OSD criteria are worthy of mention? Other than mine, of course. ;-> What I'd predict is that this would merely shift the bone of contention. Scorned submitters would rail against non-OSD criteria being unfair, vague, and also wrongly applied (reminiscent of the old joke about 'terrible food, and such small portions!'). This will then be followed by the now-obligatory declaration that OSI is irrelevant and [something du jour] has replaced it. [1] Here I've used Yank-standard spelling because https://opensource.org/approval does. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss