Why limit the pledge to OSI-approved licences?

[Ben Cotton]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2020 at 10:28 AM Heiki Lõhmus <repentinus at fsfe.org> wrote:
>
> Second, I would like to invite you all to consider whether the pledge
> should be limited to OSI-approved licences. I would like to broaden this
> to include any licence approved by the FSF or the OSI or software
> purportedly placed into the public domain as long as the source code is
> made available.
>
I wasn't a part of that decision, but I would assume it's because
OSI's list is the canonical list of open source licenses. It's an easy
way to delegate the license analysis to a responsible body so that
Conservancy doesn't have to be in that business. Adding FSF's list
seems like a reasonable change to me, but...

> Developers less versed in copyright questions or simply deeply opposed
> to copyright expansionism may also distribute Free Software with an
> informal statement along the lines of "all rights disclaimed" or
> "released into the public domain".

...the difficulty here is that the public domain doesn't exist in all
jurisdictions. I agree with the intent of the "as long as it grants
the four freedoms, it should count" position, but that makes it a lot
more complicated. Pointing to a list or lists of vetted licenses
(ideally that Conservancy doesn't have to maintain itself) removes
ambiguity.


-- 
Ben Cotton