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OSI Approves Three New Licenses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the vanilla-chocolate-or-strawberry dept.

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 Another (the RTSP) was withdrawn because the license-discuss mailing list convinced the submittor that it wasn't ready.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."

3 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Too Many Already by BurritoWarrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If anything will be the downfall of OSS, it is the multitude of licenses. It will cost companies too much in attorney's fees to be worth their trouble. How many licenses do we need?

    1. Re:Too Many Already by treat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Commercial software has a different license for every different product and every different version. In my experience, companies never have their legal department review a license before purchasing software.

  2. Re:steeling myself for a flaming, but... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    "freeware" is a blanket term that usually refers to any program in binary form or source code that is given away. In other words the "free" in "freeware" means free-as-in-beer, or stuff you don't pay for. For that reason it is extremely general and nonspecific. Both "Open Source" and "Free Software" are much more specific than "freeware". These days, the word freeware has come mostly to refer to software that is available for free in executable binary format only and is closed source.