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      We de-facto instituted what my colleague Richard Fontana once called the “Rule of Three” — assuring that any potential FOSS license should be met with suspicion unless (a) the OSI declares that it meets their Open Source Definition, (b) the FSF declares that it meets their Free Software Definition, and (c) the Debian Project declares that it meets their Debian Free Software Guidelines.

      What I find funny is that they candidly admit how they managed to gain power over software licensing, while they propose to put their people in charge of new license proposals. I guess they totally ignore what “conflict of interest” means.

      GPLv1 and GPLv2 were designed in private, by Stallman and Cohen.

      I think hackers should avoid groupthink and manipulations like

      The OSI should now adopt a new requirement for license approval — namely, that licenses without a community-oriented drafting process should be rejected for the meta-reason of “non-transparent drafting”, regardless of their actual text. This will have the added benefit of forcing future license drafters to come to OSI, on their public mailing lists, before the license is finalized.

      They are not protecting free software here, but their own interests.

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        I think FOSS licenses would benefit from the same thing I believe will fix the FOSS software problem of mob rule and groupthink: Completely anonymous authorship.

        Remove the ego, ethnicity, gender, et al, and base your opinion on the commit.

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          This is a very interesting perspective. I need to think about it.

          Note however that, given the current Copyright laws, no authorship means no copyright and no copyright means no Copyleft.

          Thus basically every corporation out there would free ride the generosity of hackers.

          At a first look, this would be possible in a world where propertary software is illegal.

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            Anonymous doesn’t mean no ownership, though.

            However, it would require something along the lines of a CLA to allow another party (aka A foundation) to enforce your copyright.