The OSI process described at http://www.opensource.org/approval and linked pages seems to encourage a lawyer only on the license-advocate side and not require one on the OSI side, unless I missed something? So while that means you’ve almost always got a lawyer involved (good), it means there’s almost always a lawyer on the license-advocate side (bad). I thought that was why OSI has been such a proliferation catalyst for most of its life, because it’s driven by “please approve our cool new licence” open-sourcer egoism rather than “should we accept this licence?” debianer pragmatism.

Anyway, the recent changes are most welcome. Sinner that repenteth and so on.

One advantage of the OSI lists is that the licences are scrutinised by Lawyers before they are published. The OSI job is to ensure a “so-called” open source licence is indeed open source (and thus free software). Furthermore, whilst approval of licences is dependent only on their legal status, the categorisation of licenses is based on actual use.

Does the Debian process have lawyers looking at the licences?

I agree that automated tools are not sufficient in IP management processes. They are helpful, sure, but nothing beats an understanding of the licence terms and a proper audit trail and accountability.

OSS Watch are here to help projects based in the education sector manage their IP correctly.

We need to educate developers and education is part of my company’s mission, right there alongside providing IT services, but it seems we’re very unusual about that. Automation is helpful (again, look at things like machine-readable copyright control from the debian project, which are in their infancy but could be useful soon) but no substitute for education and vigilence.

It’s nice that OSI have finally started doing something similar, but they’re rather late to this effort after years of helping license proliferation by approving licences in abstract without regard to whether they’re popular in either sense.