[jdev] [Fwd: [Members] deprecating JOSL at OSI]

[Peter Saint-Andre]

FYI...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Members] deprecating JOSL at OSI
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 09:17:55 -0600
From: Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at jabber.org>
Reply-To: JSF members discussion list <members at jabber.org>
To: members at jabber.org

As you may know, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is working to fight
the proliferation of open-source licenses by encouraging developers to
use a common subset of the licenses in existence (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc.):

http://www.opensource.org/docs/policy/licenseproliferation.php

As part of their efforts, they would like to change most specialized
licenses from "Preferred" to "Deprecated" at the OSI website. This has
already been done with the Intel Open Source License, at Intel's
initiative. Over the last few months I have been in communication with
the OSI and other interested parties, including the author (Larry
Rosen), about the desirability of deprecating or "de-recommending" the
Jabber Open Source License (JOSL) at the OSI website.

Last week I recommended to the JSF Board of Directors that we proceed
with this change, for the following reasons:

1. It will be good publicity for us to make this change proactively
(rather than waiting for the OSI to ask us) because license
proliferation is a hot issue.

2. There really are too many licenses, and many large organizations (and
open-source developers) are tired of the duplication and confusion.

3. JOSL has not used for new projects in quite a while as far as I know,
and is mainly used by "legacy" projects such as JabberApplet and
JabberBeans.

4. If we are going to keep using JOSL as an OSI-recommended license, it
really needs to be rewritten (e.g., it asserts that all code under JOSL
belongs to Jabber Inc.!). I think it is simpler to deprecate it.

After some discussion, the Board approved this initiative, and at OSCON
2005 last week I completed the necessary paperwork to make this change a
reality.

Please note that the JOSL will continue to be published on the OSI
website and will retain its status as an OSI-recognized open-source
license. No code that has been released under the JOSL will need to
change. The only thing that changes is that the OSI will no longer
recommend the JOSL as an open-source license for use by developers.

If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please contact
me directly or on this list.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml

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