Our OSI License Rule

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

Early on we decided that the foundation would use OSI (the Open Source
Initiative) as our arbiter of what constitutes a legitimate open source
license, and that we would restrict ourselves to only releasing software
under OSI approved licenses.

The issue that arises is whether we are willing to guarantee that into the
distant future, and if so, how we can institutionalize the requirement
such that it can't be altered by a future board decision (if we actually do
want to do that).

The matter comes up, in part, as the GeoTools projects contemplates assigning
copyright over it's code to OSGeo.  The developers, not surprisingly, want
assurances that we aren't going to "weird out" and try to turn the code
proprietary or do something else incompatible with our open source mission.

Last March or so we established a legal document with rules for operation
of the foundation with the intent of revisiting it since it left things
quite malliable and open to changes by the board.  I am wondering if one
approach would be to embed the OSI requirement in that document as part of
our Charter at the same time that we revise it in other ways.

My concern with this approach is that these rules for the foundation
(articles of incorporation?) can be changed by the board.  So unless we
made the rules for changing the rules quite strict (agreement of all
board members?) then this wouldn't be a very strong guarantee.

Another plausible approach would be for the foundation to sign a legal
contract that binds us to it - possible with one or several of the
GeoTools contributors for instance.  This would potentially bind us
indefinately.

So, this email is really first a request to know if the board is willing
to be "bound fast" to a rule stating that we can only ever release software
under OSI approved licenses (we should make it explicitly clear that this
rule does not apply to documentation, data, or other things besides
software code).

The second is what mechanism do we think is best to accomplish this end.

I've cc:ed Adrian Custer who is following up on this issue on behalf of
the GeoTools project.  Please try to keep him in cc:es on this topic.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org