Russell Nelson, som ble utnevnt som president i Open Source Initiative (OSI) da Eric Raymond gikk av i februar i år, foreslår i en melding til e-postlisten license-discuss@opensource.org tre nye betingelser i definisjonen av åpen kildekode.
Bakgrunnen for forslaget er det mylderet av ulike åpen kildekodelisenser som benyttes av ulike aktører. Det finnes i dag mer enn 50 ulike lisenser - en oversikt finnes på denne siden. Et mål som tidligere er blitt nevnt, er å koke dette ned til tre ulike lisenser, GPL (GNU General Public License), en kommersiell versjon av GPL, samt BSD.
Nelson skriver som følger:
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11. *The license must not be duplicative.*
That is, it is up to the submitter to demonstrate that the license solves a problem not sufficiently addressed by an existing certified license. Certification may be denied to any submitted license, even a technically OSD-conformant license, if OSI deems it duplicative.
12. *The license must be clearly written, simple, and understandable.*
Open-source licenses are written to serve people who are not attorneys, and they need to be comprehensible by people who are not attorneys. OSI may deny certification to licenses which, though technically correct and OSD-compliant, are so obscure and complicated that an intelligent layperson cannot be assured of knowing his or her rights and liabilities after reading it. The burden of engineering this clarity falls on the submitter.
13. *The license must be reusable*.
If the license contains proper names of individuals, associations, or projects, these must be
incorporated by reference from an attachment that declares the names of the issuer and any other cited parties, and which can be modified without changing the terms of the license. As the sole exception, the license may name its owner and steward.
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