On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 3:31 PM Luis Villa <l...@lu.is> wrote: > As the docs and our practice suggest, the board has always formally been the > final decision maker, never the list. But I'm not sure that the distinction > matters at all - for submitters, and for the broader open source community, > being screened and rejected by a list that is (1) a documented, formal part > of the process (2) hosted on opensource.org and (3) has a lot of present and > former board members on it is, well, "tantamount to OSI rejecting a license". > > Perhaps there is some important nuance there I'm missing, though.
It's my feeling that engagement (by non-submitters) on license-review has declined over time (and over a longer period of time if you consider the license approval portion of license-discuss pre-~2007 or whenever l-r was created). I wouldn't know how to attempt to measure that (maybe look at subscriptions and unsubscriptions, and try to account for variations in the numbers of licenses submitted or under active consideration during a given time period). But the more engagement goes down, the harder it is to seriously contend that l-r is equivalent to a board committee, and indeed the harder it is to contend that the OSI is just acting in accordance with community consensus as evidenced by the list. If I'm right about engagement, it seems consistent with the views you've repeatedly expressed about the problems with having a mailing list-centered process for reviewing licenses. One possible nuance is that even if the "committee" reaction to a given license is negative, causing a license submitter not having the persistence of someone like Jim Wright to withdraw, the reason for that reaction may itself be unclear or not clearly justified, and there won't be anything approaching the clear disposition that a vote to reject a license will have. Richard > > Luis > _______________________________________________ > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@lists.opensource.org > http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org -- Richard Fontana Senior Commercial Counsel Red Hat, Inc. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
