Business Team/Minutes/2011-03-03

Attendees

• Kim Weins
• Phil Odence
• Kate Stewart
• Gary O'Neall
• Jilayne Lovejoy
• Scott Lamons
• Michael Herzog
• Phil Koltun
• Kirsten Newcomer

Process for Adding New Standard Licenses.

We did not finish discussion, so will continue at next meeting. Notes so far are below.

• Anyone can request license to be added through a web form (possibly Bugzilla).
• Information
  • Person Name
  • Email
  • Organization - community/company
  • License name
  • Actual license text
  • URL for where they found license text
  • Comments -- why they want it
  • Example(s) of open source packages/files that use it
  • Why they want it -- is it their own license or is it something they have encountered in audits
  • Is it going thru OSI approval?
  • Other notes or we need to know
• Process
  • First validation/vetting for complete/correct info - contact person who submitted it
  • Decision making by group
    • Allow comments in a timeline
    • Start with an open ended time
    • Have business team make decision initially until we see what the volume is
      • Shoot for doing this first year unless it's getting out of hand
    • Way to batch it - handle at biz team meetings
    • Can have some where we decide to "defer" for now.
    • Business team will decide -- likely based on majority vote for people that attended the meeting (at least 5 people and 1 legal)
    • Publish the ones we will vote on 2 weeks in advance to full list. Discussion/comments on biz list.
      • Set up a separate wiki page to keep the list tracked of what we are voting on when
  • Later -- Have a more formal committee that makes a decision - 5-7 people
    • Should have 2 legal spots on community
    • Might want at least one community spot
    • Nominations (including self nominations) make clear the requirements
    • Way to adjust if someone is not participating
  • Assignment of standard name
  • Data entered into repo and templatizing is done
  • Review/QA of the data in the repo
• Suggested Criteria
  • Center of gravity is OSS license but will consider freeware or other licenses that are widely encountered. For example would consider Sun Binary Licenses. Things that share many/all of OSI attributes - but may have additional requirements
  • Not for purely commercial licenses (ex EULA, or Oracle license)
  • License must be publicly accessible
  • License that is seen across multiple projects or on a heavily used project
  • License that will be popular in future (eg new version of GPL, Apache)
• Need a statement that we don't necessarily consider all these licenses to be open source - just trying to facilitate a way to refer to them. Check how Fedora does this (talk to Spot)
• Timeframe
  • Will need to set expectations for turnaround time