OSI Licensing – a year in review
Since it has been roughly one year since the newest board members were chosen, I’d like to put on my new hat as chair of the License Committee and recap some license committee highlights from this past year.
Some things that got done:
- Revised the opensource.org/licenses landing page to make it more useful to visitors who are not familiar with open source.
- Reorganized and revised the FAQ, which now has categories and a few improved questions.
- Handled a stream of license submissions, including AROS, MOSL, “No Nonsense“, and CeCILL. The new EUPL is in the pipeline as well.
- Adopted a beta Code of Conduct for license-discuss/license-review. This was drafted with the intent that it will eventually be a CoC for all of OSI, but it is still being formally beta-tested in the license committee community.
Some important projects have also been started or discussed, but are still incomplete:
- Opened discussion of the status of licenses without patent grants in the modern licensing world.
- Improved the presentation of existing licenses. This started with removing comments that were confusing to visitors. There are still open suggestions to present plain text licenses, and update the template BSD/MIT licenses, as well as some other ideas – help still wanted!
- We’re looking into objective analysis of license popularity, and a “license chooser” project. Both are huge projects. They do have some momentum, but even if they are at all workable, they are still a long way out. Please contact Luis Villa or the list if you have thoughts or resources for either of these projects.
I hope that this sounds like a pretty good year- it isn’t perfect but it felt like a good start to me, giving us some things we can build on for future years.
If you think this kind of thing sounds useful for the broader open source community, you can help 🙂
- Join license-discuss, or, if you’re more sensitive to mail traffic, but still want to help with the committee’s most important work, join license-review, which focuses on approving/rejecting proposed new licenses.
- Become a member! Easier than joining license-discuss 😉 and provides both fiscal and moral support to the organization.