Why limit the pledge to OSI-approved licences?

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Somebody claiming to be Ben Cotton wrote:
>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...

I do like the simplicity of using the OSI-approved list for this kind of thing,
and I guess an easy thing to say is "if you want to be protected by the pledge,
switch to an OSI-approved license".  (For example, the WTFPLv2, CC0, and "public
domain" are all kind of poorly suited to software projects that want any legal
protections for other reasons anyway.)

However, the OSI has been pretty clear that they don't intend the approved list
to be completely comprehensive, so it may also exclude historical software meant
to be included that just happens to use a reasonable license not on the OSI list.
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