On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 3:25 PM Ben Hilburn <bhilb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For what it's worth, I think if the decision process was more clear & > transparent, it would be easier to tell whether or not "loud voices" actually > do carry undue influence. As things stand now, I think you could construct > pretty strong arguments going either way - which is a huge part of the > problem. For many submitted licenses, there is no vote because the submitter essentially withdraws from the process (formally or otherwise) in the face of negative reaction on the mailing list. One of the more famous examples of this was the submission of CC0, where Creative Commons withdrew the license from consideration after the discussion came to center on criticism of the "No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document." language. But in most cases the community (license-review) reaction clearly points in one direction. Historically there was a tendency to encourage the license submitter to withdraw. The recent decision to reject the Convertible Free Software License v1.4 is believed to be the first time the OSI ever rejected a license. That might suggest that if there's a loud voices problem, it is not about undue influence on *OSI*, but undue influence on the license submitter (i.e., the reaction to the license is so overwhelmingly negative that the license submitter informally or formally withdraws from the process). This view implies that the OSI ought to be approving more licenses than it has been. Yet for a long time the OSI struggled to accommodate the view that it had erred in the past by too easily approving too many licenses (most of which were submitted by business interests, it should be noted), and there is still a viewpoint out there that the OSI should withdraw entirely from license approval because we have all the licenses we could possibly need. And there has also been much criticism of what some pejoratively call "crayon licenses" (I more charitably call them thought experiments) which characterize a lot of the license submissions. Richard _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
