On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 10:52 AM Pamela Chestek <pamela.ches...@opensource.org> wrote: > > Changes to the Website > We have also made a minor change to the language describing the license > review process on https://opensource.org/approval. The page formerly said > “Approve, if (a) there is sufficient consensus emerging from community > discussion that approval is justified, and (b) the OSI determines that the > license conforms to the Open Source Definition and guarantees software > freedom." The page now says “Approve if, after taking into consideration > community discussion, the OSI determines that the license conforms to the > Open Source Definition and guarantees software freedom.”
This is a good change. I am not sure it is so minor. But I think it more accurately describes how the OSI has reached, and (as I see it) should reach its approval decisions. > License Review Committee > The License Review Committee is an OSI Board committee made up of the > following board members, as of May 2019: > > Pamela Chestek, chair, pamela.ches...@opensource.org > Elana Hashman, elana.hash...@opensource.org > Chris Lamb, chris.l...@opensource.org > Simon Phipps, webm...@opensource.org > > The License Review Committee will summarize and report the license-review > discussions to the Board for the Board’s approval or disapproval of a > proposed license. Members of the Committee also serve as moderators for the > two mailing lists. Recently Luis explained that when he was on the OSI board there was a notion that the License Review Committee was identical with all participants on the license-review list, and that the list itself was effectively a board committee. A few participants certainly spoke of it that way (most recently in Bruce's message). That was never how I saw it, frankly, even before ~2013, but anyway to the extent this marks a significant change in how the concept of the License Review Committee is understood I support this. I'd note that what I have found frustrating in some of the recent criticism of OSI is what I saw as a conflation of mailing list discussion with the board itself, though Luis explained (either here or on Twitter, I can't recall) why this conflation may have been justified, and I think in his view it was partly because the mailing list was conceived in some sense as a board committee. Richard _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
