Hi, all- Following up on Karl's email of a few months ago, this is a deliberately low-key proposal from me and other board members to simplify and improve how the OSI-approved licenses are presented on the OSI website. As it currently stands, we don't have a page we can point a newcomer to to learn about what an open source license is, or what the most common licenses are. We'd like to solve that, at least in part, by making the current http://opensource.org/licenses/ more useful by highlighting the most common licenses and by providing a bit more context about what it means to be an open source license.
Despite coming from me and other board members, the text and layout below are just a proposal, and are of course open to suggestions, improvements, and discussion. What This Is Not ============ Karl's original proposal included suggestions of how to change and update which licenses belong in which categories. This email and proposed web site changes are definitely not addressing that issue. I feel (and I'm pretty sure others on the board feel) that those questions should be addressed, but because those are complex issues that will inevitably involve months of careful discussion and planning, and because we all agree that the current website layout is unsatisfactory, we'd like to not block this quicker, smaller discussion. The Proposal ========= 1. Reorganize the left-side navigation. What is currently "Open Source Licenses," with sub-points "Licenses by Category", "Licenses by Name", "License Review Process," and "License Proliferation," would simply become "Open Source Licensing" (content of that page discussed below). "License Review Process" and "License Proliferation" would be moved to bullets under "The Open Source Definition," because those pages are primarily about OSI's process and standards rather than about specific licenses or about open source licenses more generally. By slightly hiding the "by category" and "by names" pages, we'd be funneling people (particularly newcomers) to a slightly more informative page (and one that can be improved over time), while not losing the master lists altogether for the times when those are needed. 2. The "Open Source Licensing" page (replacing http://opensource.org/licenses/) would be fleshed out to say (hopefully all changes self-explanatory): Open Source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition and have been approved through the Open Source Initiative's license review process. The following Open Source licenses are popular, widely used, or have strong communities: Apache License, 2.0 (Apache-2.0) BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license (BSD-3-Clause) BSD 3-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" license (BSD-2-Clause) GNU General Public License (GPL) GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL) MIT license (MIT) Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0) Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL-1.0) Eclipse Public License (EPL-1.0) A complete list of all Open Source Initiative-approved licenses, including those above, is available: sorted by name (alphabetical) sorted by category For more information about Open Source licenses and in particular about the Open Source Initiative's license review process, see: The Open Source Definition (annotated version) The OSI License Review Process Information on License Proliferation and the 2006 License Proliferation Report Miscellany ======== * We'll of course clean up any dangling links caused by changed URLs and set up proper redirects before changing any URLs. (Not entirely clear it makes sense to change /licenses/ to /licensing/, which would be the primary URL change based on the previous suggestions). * In the longer term, once Drupal is upgraded, it will likely make sense to generate http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and http://opensource.org/licenses/category programatically, rather than through the current manual listing, which is of course error-prone. (Some people have suggested doing away with the alphabetical list altogether, which I personally would be fine with.) That may cause some more tweaks in URLs and layouts, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
