On 5/26/2019 3:04 AM, Rick Moen wrote: > Please pardon a wee bit more pontificating: I take Board good faith > Board as given, but IMO it's well to be wary of Internet gamesmanship, > that a cynic might imagine being behind _some_ claims of oppression from > some never-identified silent majority[1] or whatever. Hi Rick,
Speaking in my personal capacity here and quoting only a bit of your email for context, but I take your point in the whole email. What I believe you are linking two things happening that are actually unrelated. Putting the content of the recent open source license submissions aside, the OSI has been criticized recently on two vectors, that the mailing list fails to function as originally intended and the unpredictability of license approval. On the functioning of the mailing list, as Simon pointed out the Board was in agreement that this was a problem and approved the email that was sent. There are probably differences of opinion within the Board (at least I perceive Simon and I to have differences of opinion) on whether the second point is actually something that needs to be fixed. The voices who are complaining about the second issue that immediately come to my mind are lawyers, and I agree with them. I suspect we are used to working in a world where we have statutes and regulations and precedential case law, so we are unhappy when the answer is only "because we say so." I also think that the OSI will be significantly harmed, perhaps existentially, if it is perceived as acting on whims rather than demonstrating leadership through rational explanation and justification. But I hope to ease your concern that I am a rigid rule follower and can be gamed that way. First, even if I could be gamed or I have nefarious intent, the License Review Committee is four people and the Board is eleven people. I surely can't act unilaterally. Second, I'm not a rigid rule follower, although I am someone who believes that decisions should be consistent and backed up with rationale more compelling than "because we say so." For example, I direct your attention to (brought to my attention by Kyle Mitchell) the OSI-approved Reciprocal Public License.[^1] This license says "Regarding deployment, under the RPL your changes, bug fixes, extensions, etc. must be made available to the open source community at large when you Deploy in any form -- either internally or to an outside party. Once you start running the software you have to start sharing the software." How do you reconcile that with the current position, and a supposed basis for refusing a license, that there must be freedom to run software? "Because we say so" works, but I think people would be justified in their unhappiness if there is no explanation (which might be "oops, that one slipped through!") So, stay tuned on how the rigor of the decision-making process plays out in the future. I understand that people on this list may be skeptical of my commitment to software freedom and/or open source software, and for you time will tell. That's fine with me. I do hope, though, that there is room for healthy disagreement about what exactly "software freedom" means. We have a recent challenge to the scope of the concept, which is whether it extends to data portability (and if you want to talk about that, lets start a new thread). I do hope that simply having a different opinion on the meaning of software freedom at the fringes doesn't mean that one has become captive to anti-freedom forces. Pam Chestek [^1]: https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5 _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
