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Licence Type: foresee a term to indicate that a licence is OSI approved

Anonymous (not verified)
Published on: 01/03/2012 Discussion Archived

 

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/adms_foss-wg/2012-March/000080.html

I would support an approach with allowed differentiation between


(1)   Not OSI approved licence

(2)   OSI approved and within the common recommended subset by OSI (GPL, Apache, MIT, etc)

(3)   OSI approved but not common licence

This would be of practical use because:


*         It would enable users to understand if the claimed license was in fact OSI approved - some aren't

*         And if it was a common license - to reduce the overhead of legal/compliance management

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stijngoedertier (not verified) Fri, 08/06/2012 - 08:48

This recommendation proposes to reuse the licence proliferation categories defined by the Open Source Initiative, which it uses as an outcome of its approval process. I think the "taxonomy" below merges Rashid's recommendation with the OSI licence proliferation categories. We could take this categorisation and use SKOS to create a machine-readable representation, but would it not be more appropriate and easiest if the Open Source Initiative were to maintain such a "proliferation category taxonomy" in a machine-readable format themselves?

 

OSI Approved and within recommended subset

  • Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities: We used statistics obtained from public sources to determine which licenses are widely used. We believed that there were a few licenses that, while not the most popular, were widely used within their communities and that these also belonged in this group.

​OSI Approved but not within recommended subset

  • Special purpose licenses: Certain licensors, such as schools and the US government, have specialized concerns, such as specialized rules for government copyrights. Licenses that were identified as meeting a special need were placed in this group.
  • Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses: Several licenses in this group are excellent licenses and have their own followings. The committee struggled with this group, but ultimately decided that if we were to attack the license proliferation problem, we had to prune licenses. Thus, licenses that were perceived as completely or partially redundant with existing licenses were placed in this group.

Non-​OSI Approved

  • Non-reusable licenses: Licenses in this group are specific to their authors and cannot be reused by others. Many, but not all, of these licenses fall into the category of vanity licenses.
  • Superseded licenses: Licenses in this category have been superseded by newer versions.
  • Licenses that have been voluntarily retired: Self-defining category. No one should use these licenses going forward, although we assume that licensors may or may not choose to continue to use them.
  • Other/Miscellaneous licenses: These licenses do not fall neatly into any category.

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Patrice-Emmanuel SCHMITZ
Patrice-Emmanuel SCHMITZ Fri, 08/06/2012 - 12:29

In my opinion Tariq RASHID has made a pertinent recommendation.
It could be done by adding 2 fields to the licence description:
- OSI approved (Yes/No),  and if Yes:
- Recommended subset: licences that are popular, widely used or with strong communities (Yes/No)

To define or validate the subset, Joinup can indeed take over the OSI subset (weakness: it does not differentiate V2 and V3 of GPL while the two versions are not compatible), adding the EUPL (wich is the most used licence in the framework of Joinup, after the GPLs).

The Joinup recommended subset would be:

- European Union Public Licence (EUPL)
- Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0)
- BSD 3-Clause "New" or FreeBSD (BSD-2-Clause)
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT license (MIT)
- Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0)
- Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL-1.0)
- Eclipse Public License (EPL-1.0) 

It is interesting to compare with the UK observatory OSS Watch (University of Oxford) which maintains also a subset of the most popular licences (in Europe): 

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/licencefinder.xml  

 

 

stijngoedertier (not verified) Fri, 29/06/2012 - 17:20

As the Open Source Initiative owns the data, it was proposed that the OSI is the most appropriate publisher of such a "proliferation category taxonomy" in a machine-readable format 

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