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Special TreatmentSpecial TreatmentPosted Oct 16, 2007 20:24 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767)In reply to: Special Treatment by ncm Parent article: OSI Approves Microsoft License Submissions
""" but the appearance is that MS did, in fact, get special treatment. """ Indeed they did. There would not have been nearly as much debate before approving the licenses if they had not been submitted by Microsoft. """ They warned that they would not approve new licenses without compelling reason. """ Such a statement would have been more convincing had they started by denying GPLv3... a new license for which there was really no compelling reason. Either a license meets the requirements of the definition or it does not. If it does, it should be approved. It is *not* the OSI's place to fight license proliferation. Doing so would be a sure path to irrelevance for them. The value of the OSI is to act as a trusted authority on whether licenses meet the definition, no matter *how* many approved licenses there are. If they start denying approval on the basis of whether *they* think the license is needed and useful, then *their* usefulness to developers would be lost, since "every would know" that this or that license was really an OSS license, except that the OSI wouldn't approve it. And they would use those licenses, anyway, if they suited the licensors' purposes.
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Special Treatment Posted Oct 16, 2007 20:56 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Having approved redundant licenses from MS -- redundant in that they differ from existing licenses only in being incompatible with all of them -- only underscores OSI's present irrelevance. Microsoft would not have submitted the licenses if they meant to use them with or without OSI approval. They have plenty of other unapproved licenses to use already. The whole charade depends on having actually approved licenses. Getting these licenses stamped is only a step in a process. You may be certain that the remaining steps will not be toward peaceful coexistence with Free Software. Evidently MS is now applying strategists in this area who are much smarter than the OSI board members.
Special Treatment Posted Oct 17, 2007 20:09 UTC (Wed) by RussNelson (guest, #27730) [Link] ncm writes "... are much smarter than the OSI board members." That's a solvable problem. You are smarter than us, so you should run for the OSI board. Elections are held in middle to late March. Public nominations are accepted at osi@opensource.org. I suggest you put up your name for one of the seats that will be expiring at the end of March.
OSI board elections Posted Oct 17, 2007 20:33 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Hey, Russ, that's interesting - I've never heard anything about OSI board elections before, and Google doesn't seem to know much either. The bylaws say that the board is elected by ... the board. How open is the process really, and do you plan to announce this election somewhere other than here?
Special Treatment Posted Oct 16, 2007 21:15 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Such a statement would have been more convincing had they started by denying GPLv3... a new license for which there was really no compelling reason.That was not the point of view of the creators of GPLv2, the license most often used in Free software. You will appreciate the fact that their opinion carries more weight than yours. It is *not* the OSI's place to fight license proliferation.They have stated such a purpose in the past. A sure way to irrelevance is to express a bunch of good wishes and then not come through with them. How about the first criterion to avoid said proliferation? 1. The license must not be duplicativeWhy approve a license and then put in the category "Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses (9)"?
Special Treatment Posted Oct 17, 2007 7:12 UTC (Wed) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link] Because they're *not* duplicative: they are Microsoft's versions of the GPL and BSD licence, only specially tailored so that they aren't GPL-compatible, as it has been pointed out above. So they serve a very special purpose: have MS experiment with OSS without risking to contribute a single line of code to the OSS world. Are they bad (in that they betray the spirit of FLOSS)? Yes. Are they OSI-compliant? Yes again (based on what I've read, I'll skip actually reading them thank you :). I really can't see another outcome out of this submission. rehdon
Special Treatment Posted Oct 17, 2007 20:16 UTC (Wed) by RussNelson (guest, #27730) [Link] My blog allows me to put postings into categories. After a few years of doing this, and after participating in the license proliferation committee, I'm convinced that ``categories'' is a wrong solution for organizing blog postings and licenses. I'm also convinced that ``subdirectories'' is a wrong solution for organizing files. A category is a single attribute. What you really want is tags. Yes, everything needs a unique tag which nothing else has, but we have a perfectly fine system for uniqueness: time. Every moment is unique. So, a license like the GPL might have "reciprocal,popular,stewarded,fsf" on it. Etc.
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