On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 12:07 PM Josh Berkus <j...@berkus.org> wrote: > > On 8/25/20 1:51 PM, Andrew DeMarsh wrote: > > Demonstrate that at least x projects, which are not related to each > > other, either currently use the license, or will utilise it, if the > > license is accepted as being "Open Source". Whilst "x" is an arbitrary > > number, the idea is that by being used, there is a demonstrated real > > world use with professional intent for a usable OSI license which fills > > a previously unaddressed need with the OSI approved licence range. > > FWIW, *most* license submitters have done exactly this. When they don't, > it's usually the first question asked, and I don't know that we've > passed a license that didn't have at least one substantial project > behind it in the last 10 years.
I could be wrong but I think several of the licenses approved by OSI in the past 10 years were not, at the time of approval, in use by any substantial project (by any reasonable definition of "substantial"), and I believe several may not have been used by any projects at all. It should be pretty easy to check this. For a while there was a tendency for people to propose "thought experiment licenses" for OSI approval, and I think the OSI may have encouraged this practice early in its history, but that seems to have become less common during the past few years. I have mixed feelings about a "substantial use" bar. The thought experiment licenses were largely a nuisance, in my view, but experimentation in open source license drafting should not be discouraged. Richard > So this seems like a solved problem, > unless we're proposing raising the bar to exclude startup projects. > > I would support requiring submitters to identify themselves, although > I'd like to include in that identifications that might be internet-based > rather than government-issued (e.g. "I'm 'onehacker' on Gitlab, you can > see my projects here"). > > -- > Josh Berkus _______________________________________________ The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address. License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
