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Since Microsoft proposed in August that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) approve a couple of its "shared-source" licenses as "official" open source software (OSS) licenses, the OSI's "license-discuss" mailbox has been overflowing every morning. The wave of emails has been helped along by the forum participants deciding to bring the Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPL v3) into the mix, although the OSI has already basically approved GPL v3 when it was released in June (and formally approved it last week). Remember the FSF and OSI are the guys that argue over free vs. open all the time.

What is surprising is that at least one OSS luminary that contributes to the license discussion is now saying "enough is enough."

Chris di Bona, OSS evangelist at Google, got the ball rolling a few weeks ago by suggesting the decision to OK the licenses should be based on more than just literal interpretations of the OSI's rules. In other words, it was OK to "vote against" Microsoft's request simply if you were a Microbasher. Groklaw piled on, arguing an interpretation of OSI rules that it was literally OK to discriminate against Microsoft by OSI rules.

That opened the floodgates, pro and con and in all directions. The discussion diverged into
-- the possibility of having two types of licenses (literally OK and ideologically OK)
-- the need to drop an old license if a new similar one was too much like the old one (making one discussion thread a choice between MS-PL and one of the Berkeley licenses)
-- a series of comparisons of Microsoft's request with licenses that do not even exist
And as I said above, the group even waded into the already decided GPL v3 process uninvited.

Now, Brian Behlendorf of Apache Web Server fame has suggested that the group rein it in. But his solution is to stop discussing legal issues on the license discussion forum (and to take the discussion to another forum). That would be pretty un-OSS of them. An underlying theme is that the wide-ranging discussion and options under consideration will make the OSI irrelevant.

Despite conspiracy theorists' likely analysis, I do not believe that is or was Microsoft's intent. Microsoft even had a lawyer monitoring and responding during part of the debate but Microsoft seemed to back away from participation in all the offshoots of their original request. The facilitator of the license-discuss forum said in early September in a periodic summary that he issues that he did not believe the Microsoft license approval discussion was over.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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