>>From: License-discuss <license-discuss-boun...@lists.opensource.org> On >>Behalf Of Lawrence Rosen >>Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2022 7:48 PM >>To: license-discuss@lists.opensource.org >>Subject: [License-discuss] Retroactively disapproving licenses
>>For what my own limited opinion is worth, I certainly do not delegate to him, >>nor to the OSI board of directors, the right to retroactively disapprove my >>own licenses along with my own carefully-considered >>jurisdictional >>provisions. And I readily admit, I do not profess to be an authority on >>German or French licenses capable to telling them to change their provisions. >>Brad and the OSI have ONLY the authority to >>determine whether licenses >>satisfy the Open Source Definition AND NOTHING MORE. FWIW, I've got to disagree with Larry on some of this. I think it is within the power of the OSI board of directors to "disapprove" previously approved licenses (i.e., remove them from the approve license list), and in fact, there are a handful of licenses (none of them written by Larry) which I -- and I believe others -- maintain should not have been approved by the OSI because they have provisions that violate the OSD. I also think that there are other factors, beyond OSI conformance, that can, and should, go into license approval (for example, a license is so poorly or ambiguously drafted that it can create problems for users, or -- for example -- it explicitly omits certain rights -- like patent -- that can result in them being non-open). In fact, a couple of years ago, I ran for the OSI board with this issue as one of my platform positions: https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI%20Board%20of%20Directors/Board%20Member%20Elections/2020%20Individual%20and%20Affiliate%20Elections/Smith2020 Of course, I wasn't elected so I suspect the OSI board has no interest in pursuing my ideas, but I do believe the Board can -- if it wants -- remove license from the list or indicate that a particular licenses have problematic or disfavorable provisions or results and not approve them or flag them for potential users. _______________________________________________ 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
