On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 5:33 AM Pamela Chestek <pam...@chesteklegal.com> wrote:
> Hi Luis, > > Thanks for the comments. Speaking entirely for myself here, I agree with > you. I hope everyone appreciates that this email was just a first step. We > are also aware that email sucks (I'm about to tear my hair out after only a > month of it, so I hear you) and will be working on a better tooling > solution. I don't expect that to happen too soon, though. Small org, > volunteers, you get it I'm sure. > Yes, absolutely! Like I said, I greatly appreciate this as a first step, and will help as best I can. (I'd be happy to participate in a collaborative summary document <http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2019/04/22/aic-collaborative-summary-documents/> of the CAL in a modern collaboration tool like Dropbox Paper or Google Docs, for example; and might even be moved to volunteer as a moderator for a Discourse instance.) > As to rationale and recordkeeping, I expect to be providing a rationale > document about the OSI's decisions on license approval. However, Richard > Fontana has pointed out the process problem where there is a pile-on in > license-review, causing the license submitter to withdraw the license and > then no opportunity for the OSI to provide any feedback on what the OSI > itself actually thought about the license. Should the OSI be in the > business of giving "advisory opinions," and if so, how? > Where there's been a substantial point made, I think the answer is probably yes - a concise and board-endorsed summary of the CC0 withdrawal, for example, would have been repeatedly useful to be able to point at over the years. How about how the "Master's-Console Open Source Definitive License," a > license clearly not ready for review, was handled? The problems were quite > obvious with it, so does anything more need to be said about it? > I agree that in trivial/obvious cases like that one, a full opinion need not be issued. It might still be worth keeping a list of "trivially rejected licenses" by general category ("obviously discriminatory", "incoherently written", "explicit patent non-grant", "ICE/996-style", etc.) as a reference. > ICYMI, I sent out an email stating we were assuming that it was withdrawn > because the submitter moved the discussion to L-D, although never > communicated to us that it was formally withdrawn. Should this have been > handled differently? > I thought that was a good first step! One could imagine, after a suitable waiting period, adding a link to that email to opensource.org/rejected-licenses so as to memorialize it and make it easy to find later? > And what about a license that is approved? Every license has flaws that > people note. Should a rationale document explain why these weren't > considered problematic, or is approval good enough? > By analogy to the Rust and Wikipedia RFC summary processes I mentioned in my first email, I think probably for all serious license proposals the board should have before it a community-reviewed (ideally community-drafted!) list of pros/cons/substantive issues raised/issued resolved, which it could either approve as-is (in obvious/easy cases) or add its own color/flavor to (in more complex cases where an actual decision is necessary). Some positive effects we might expect to see from this: - documentation that supplements institutional memory (why did we approve some of those old licenses? unclear! a summary document might help us understand, and either fix the problems or apply consistent reasoning going forward) - encourage participation from the whole board, not just the license-review committee (good for the institutional legitimacy of the org; consistent with the move towards a broadly elected board) - sharpen/clarify key points of disagreement (speaking with my Wikipedia hat on, the summaries are really helpful for this; seems the Rust folks have had the same experience) - encourage broader non-board participation (these summary documents are a good way to lower the barrier to participation in a variety of ways) Hope that helps. Luis
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