New OSI President Seeking Proactive License Simplicity

Posted by comforteagle on Mar 2, 2005 8:05 AM EDT
OSDir.com; By Steve Mallett
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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.

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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