New OSI President Seeking Proactive License Simplicity
Russell Nelson, newly appointed President of OSI (Open Source Initiative), is proposing the addition of three new terms to the Definition of Open Source. The move comes after drawing fire over the growing number of licenses the OSI approves as meeting the definition and a long acknowledged problem of the proliferation of vanity licenses & incomprehensible legal jibberish. In an email to the OSI license-discuss mailing list Nelson wrote, "We have always pushed people in this direction, but by adding these terms to the OSD, we will be proactively refusing licenses which don't meet these requirements. 11. *The license must not be duplicative.* That is, it is up to the
submitter to demonstrate that the license solves a problem not
sufficiently addressed by an existing certified license. Certification
may be denied to any submitted license, even a technically OSD-
conformant license, if OSI deems it duplicative. 12. *The license must be clearly written, simple, and understandable.*
Open-source licenses are written to serve people who are not
attorneys, and they need to be comprehensible by people who are
not attorneys. OSI may deny certification to licenses which,
though technically correct and OSD-compliant, are so obscure
and complicated that an intelligent layperson cannot be assured
of knowing his or her rights and liabilities after reading it.
The burden of engineering this clarity falls on the submitter. 13. *The license must be reusable*. If the license contains proper
names of individuals, associations, or projects, these must be
incorporated by reference from an attachment that declares the
names of the issuer and any other cited parties, and which can be
modified without changing the terms of the license. As the sole
exception, the license may name its owner and steward." The current version of the Open Source Definition does not include any such terms, while the license approval process only encourages the use of current licenses by insisting on an explanation of why the new license doesn't meet someone's legal need. These new terms are still up for discussion. |
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