On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 01:46:18PM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote: > Richard Fontana <[email protected]> writes: > >That sums it up pretty well. The ~70-license OSI list will give anyone > >new to open source a rather distorted view of FOSS licensing. For > >example, and the part that bothers me the most, there is an > >overrepresentation of mostly-obsolete licenses that I would describe > >as monuments to the excesses of the open source bubble years, a few of > >which even fail to meet any reasonable contemporary definition of > >"open source". > > We're working on fixing those presentation problems; see > > http://projects.opensource.org/redmine/issues/4
I'm actually interested in seeing something more than mere 'deprecation', which might be appropriate for certain cases of superseded or voluntarily-deprecated-by-steward licenses. The OSI should have some sort of process for delisting formerly-approved licenses for reasons of failing to actually meet the Open Source Definition (or some future replacement of it). That is to say, the OSI should be willing to admit that it made a mistake, much as a court (while it might ordinarily apply the policy of stare decisis) will in certain cases overrule its prior decisions. Clearly for policy reasons such actions should be exceptional rather than common, and perhaps should be limited to certain licenses that were approved during a particular period in the OSI's existence (I would guess 2000-2005?). I think this is important because the existence, even in a 'deprecated' category, of licenses that (I would argue) were mistakenly approved as 'open source' does some damage to the legitimacy of the OSI and the OSD, and to open source itself. This is particularly so because, as I understand it, the 'deprecated' category is supposed to included licenses that do clearly meet community standards for what's open source. Given that the few licenses in question are (I think) obsolete, what's the harm in saying "sorry, we were wrong, this license is not an open source license after all, and here's why"? - RF _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
