• Start date: Immediately
• Initial members
• Resources needed by group
• Deliverable that will be created
• Description of how that deliverable satisfies a part of OSI's mission
• Target completion date

Start date: Immediately

Initial members

Working Group Chair: Kevin Wang

Working Group Sponsor: Simon Phipps  (Incubator Director)

OSI General Manager: Patrick Masson

Other Contributors: Other interested OSI members and existing TLDRLegal contributors.

Resources needed by group

• Web-Related Resources
  • Discussion Hub
    • Features
      • Mailing List
      • Discussion Platform
      • IRC/Chat Platform
    • Options
      • TLDRLegal Google Group + IRC Channel
• Funding
  • None needed currently, hosting and other services paid for by TLDRLegal
• Promotion
  • Links

Deliverable that will be created

One of the most fundamental and important part of the Open Source world is how people license, share and respect peoples’ rights to their work.  The OSI invests heavily on establishing quality, interoperability and standards around Open Source licensing.  Yet today, there is a massively rampant disrespect to open-source works and licenses.  Almost every company, developer or consumer of Open Source has violated a license at some point, which ultimately hurts the Open Source movement in general if the wishes of content creators aren’t respected.

TLDRLegal believes that this violation of trust doesn’t come from a malicious intent to disrespect creators, but instead the barrier of entry to understanding and complying with Open Source licenses.  Licenses like the GPL are pages of legalese that are very difficult to digest, albeit necessary, especially for the developer and creative crowd.  Yet this is where the burden of understanding lies.

TLDRLegal aims to make it easier for the creatives and content creators of the world to understand the gist of Open Source licenses.  Each license is broken down into simple lists of obligations labelled “Can”, “Cannot” and “Must” (https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)) with additional information represented in the Quick Summary text or expandable bullet points.  By serializing licenses into these formats, it opens up more opportunity to start automating the legal process around open source licenses as well as establish commonalities around licenses.

TLDRLegal is a community resource -- each page can be edited by any member and changes are submitted for a moderator to approve or deny.  The OSI will be involved in maintaining, improving and spreading this resource to the broader community.  The initial members will be involved in spearheading and leading the TLDR community as it grows.

TLDRLegal already has reached hundreds of thousands of people and is well-established in many developer communities.  Popular projects like netty.io, cocoapods and GitHub recommend and link directly to TLDRLegal.  However, this is an exciting time where the resource is already heavily used yet the community responsible for this is still very small.  I hope it will be interesting to some OSI members to help lead this movement.

Deliverable Timeline:

1.  The first step is to improve the coverage and quality of TLDRLegal information.  TLDR was built as a wiki-like interface, where anyone can edit and submit changes on the site.  So far TLDRLegal has about 80 community-managed license summaries, yet lacks full coverage of all OSI-Approved licenses.  Getting full coverage of this will be the first-priority, and then afterwards moving on to other core licenses.

2.  Current summaries are only one way of representing licenses.   The method of representing nuances have room to improve.  For instance, conditional terms (i.e. LGPL’s reciprocal nature that only activates in statically-linked projects) can be improved by actually adding trigger representations to the UI.  

3. Finally, the TLDRLegal API should be leveraged to build more tools to help the community and rebuild old TLDRLegal features (such as .  TLDRLegal will offer to open its API to OSI members for experimentation and hacking new cool ideas for the community after the initial license coverage is complete.

Description of how that deliverable satisfies a part of OSI's mission

(Stated Above)

“One of the most fundamental and important part of the Open Source world is how people license, share and respect peoples’ rights to their work.  The OSI invests heavily on establishing quality, interoperability and standards around Open Source licensing.  Yet today, there is a massively rampant disrespect to open-source works and licenses.  Almost every company, developer or consumer of Open Source has violated a license at some point, which ultimately hurts the Open Source movement in general if the wishes of content creators aren’t respected.

TLDRLegal believes that this violation of trust doesn’t come from a malicious intent to disrespect creators, but instead the barrier of entry to understanding and complying with Open Source licenses.  Licenses like the GPL are pages of legalese that are very difficult to digest, albeit necessary, especially for the developer and creative crowd.  Yet this is where the burden of understanding lies.

TLDRLegal aims to make it easier for the creatives and content creators of the world to understand the gist of Open Source licenses.  Each license is broken down into simple lists of obligations labelled “Can”, “Cannot” and “Must” (https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)) with additional information represented in the Quick Summary text or expandable bullet points.  By serializing licenses into these formats, it opens up more opportunity to start automating the legal process around open source licenses as well as establish commonalities around licenses.”

Target completion date

Immediate deliverable, ongoing OSI involvement will mean the continual upkeep and improvement of this resource.

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