[okfn-discuss] Changing license

Wed Apr 30 11:11:49 UTC 2008

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 5:20 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>    *What licenses should be listed?*
>
>  Currently opensource.org list must have over 50 licenses many of which
>  are barely used. Similarly the list on the Open Definition [1] already
>  has 10 or so and this number will surely grow. So there seem to be 3
>  options:
>
>  1. Only list 'major' licenses.
>
>  2. Relatedly: only list license types in the chooser and leave exact
>  license to be specified in the project's license file (which should
>  exist anyway).
>
>  This will also reduce the risk that the kforge value and the value in
>  the source get out of sync (as has happened to me ...) when one location
>  is updated but the other isn't.
>
>  3. List all approved licenses. This results in a large list and the need
>  to keep 'resyncing'.
>
>  Currently KForge does 1/2 while CKAN does 3 for software but 1/2 for
>  content/data. It would nice to have a common approach for the two sites
>  (and for elsewhere). What do people think?

Note that generally OSI now believes that listing that many licenses
was a mistake, and (at least in theory) requires demonstration of the
need for a new license when approving the licenses. OKF may want to
follow a similar route- only approve licenses which truly fill a new
role within the ecosystem or otherwise have truly significant
(multi-project) use.

Luis