OSI Approves Three New Licenses

Russ Nelson writes: "In our monthly board meeting this past Wednesday, the Open Source Initiative approved three new licenses for use with OSI Certified Open Source Software: the W3C license, the Motosoto license, and the Open Group Test Suite License. In other action, one license was voted down because it violated the discrimination clause of the Open Source Definition. Another (the RTSP) was withdrawn because the license-discuss mailing list convinced the submittor that it wasn't ready. And one (the DSPL) goes back to license-discuss because we disagree with their analysis and want to re-negotiate it with them. Several people have suggested that we post the licenses that we have turned down, and explain just why they don't comply with the Open Source Definition. We don't want to discourage people from submitting licenses, knowing that their license might be held up for public notice. We'd rather encourage people with non-compliant licenses to fix them so they are compliant."

Comments

Do we really need another serving...

[Colin Bayer]

of alphabet soup? I think we have more than enough licenses as it is; mod me flamebait if you wish, but we already have so many licenses as to create this odd mystique around the OSS community and keep people from diving right in and feeling the code. This whole licensing mess gave birth to the term "potentially viral software" and I think the main thing the community and the world at large needs is to get back to coding and stop writing the small print.