Perhaps the OSI board should have "cherry-picked" different licenses for
review than the ones it did select. Whenever judgment calls are made, there
is the opportunity to make them wrongly. I can only assure you that there
has been no intention to harm any contributor.
I am attaching the list of licenses (both approved and submitted for review)
as of 11/4/2000. I encourage the license-discuss participants to recommend
a priority for license review by the OSI board. [I distributed earlier
versions of this list to license-discuss and never received any priority
suggestions. Sorry, but I haven't had time to bring this list current with
more recent submissions.]
My own suggestions for prioritizing are these:
* Is the license sufficiently different from one of the licenses already
approved that we shouldn't simply encourage the submitter to use another
already-approved license?
* Does the proposed license address some useful licensing or business
concepts that can be of general application within the open source
community?
* Is the proposed license likely to be used by a sufficiently large part of
the community that it merits priority consideration?
* Is the license well written and legally sound?
* Has the submitter described the license in license-disucss with sufficient
clarity that the community and the OSI board can understand why it is
needed?
* Has the community at large expressed its interest in the license by
responding with meaningful comments (pro or con) on license-discuss?
Of course, you may have your own suggestions and prioritizing rules. Mine
are merely tossed into the hopper for your consideration.
One thing I ask you to consider: License review, even for what you think are
simple licenses, is not taken lightly by the *volunteer* OSI board. The
board has to read the licenses carefully. There is no such thing as a "slam
dunk" approval.
/Larry Rosen
Executive Director, OSI
650-216-1597
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.opensource.org
LicList 11-4-00.pdf
