Quoting Forrest J. Cavalier III (mibsoft@mibsoftware.com): > My original point is that I trust OSI to "act for the benefit of open > source" by certifying licenses. I do not trust it with any other > task or advocacy. Here's why.... There's at least one other task that's quite crucial, and discussing it can quite handily serves as a means of wrestling this mailing list back from its recent everyone-gets-to-veto-his-personal-OSI-pet-peeve trend, to the present topic of licence proliferation: I refer to serving as a primary information source on the nature and utility of open source. It's worthwhile, occasionally, attempting to see the site, especially its front page, with fresh eyes -- as if you were new to the subject. I'll attempt to do that, below. > To be sure, the individual volunteers behind OSI have success with > advocacy and influence, but those successes are outside OSI. > > The face that opensource.org puts on open source is childish. The > website design is adequate, the content is not. Looking at the opensource.org Web site, one most prominently finds the OSD, the (extremely long, alphabetical) list of approved licences, information on the certification mark, "software products" testimonials, and a set of news items. The sub-page about "O.S. for Customers, Business, and Programmers" is somewhat buried among other things in the main navbar: Suggestion to Steve Mallett: That is unfortunate, and it would be really nice if the three main "Case for Open Source" essays linked from the http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/ subpage got _much_ more emphasis on the front page: I personally think they're some of the most effective parts of the site. They should be made very easy and quick to find, and prominent. The linked "Open Source Licenses" page is, I think, quite intimately linked to OSI's current headache of gratuitous licence submissions (i.e., licences that exist for reasons of corporate vanity without bringing anything substantively new to the table): It gives little guidance in licence selection, and through error of omission creates to some degree that OSI's task in life is to give branding approval to all OSD-conformant submissions, however pointless and frivolous. Since busy people will tend to skim-read the top-line, navbar, and top-left text of pages and eschew long explanations, if OSI wishes to encourage use of major licences absent arrival of licence sporting signficant improvements -- as seems to be the case -- then it should make that point prominently and briefly. The top left of that page, instead of highlighting a licence list resembling the tenant directory in a skyscraper lobby, might well be headlined with brief recommendations, and a link to rationales and further details. > The Halloween documents posted at OSI are unprofessional and never > belonged there. Now that ESR is off the board, maybe they will come > down and show up on his personal website where they belong. Fortunately, notwithstanding the distressing example of a Board member suffering a public badmouthing campaign (largely by anonymous semi-literates) over one of his personal essays elsewhere, OSI is not yet a peeve-ocracy -- and Eric Raymond _remains_ on the Board, where he belongs. Eric is, among other things, co-author with Catherine Olanich Raymond of the recent "Licensing HOWTO", one of the best things to come out of OSI in eight years. I'll note in passing that your term, "unprofessional", is yet another of those lovely weasel-words that people chiefly use to undermine whatever is on one's personal peeve list, without the vexing and tiring requirement to actually substantiate one's views. And I think we need not waste further time on it. > I'm wary that OSI should attempt anything except approve licenses > according to the existing OSD. By a probably deeply meaningless coincidence, I'm _wary_ of this exact viewpoint, which strikes me as having created the problem we're allegedly discussing. Except you aren't discussing it, apparently because licence proliferation is fine by you. Noted; duly disregarded. -- Cheers, Rick Moen Frater Magnus vos spectat. rick@linuxmafia.com