OSI approval is a checkable status, not a vibe

The workload

'OSI-approved' names a specific, finished process, not a general vibe. Verified: the Open Source Initiative's own license review page describes what a license must go through: submission to the public license-review mailing list in plain text, community and License Committee discussion, a chance for the submitter to revise and resubmit, and a Committee recommendation put to a Board vote before the license is added to the approved list. For a founder, the relevant workload is not running this process but reading its outcome: checking whether a license a dependency uses actually appears on the list, rather than assuming a widely used license has been through it.

What the documents show

Verified: the review page states the Committee aims for consensus within 60 days of submission, or 30 days for a revised resubmission, and that the process is 'consensus-based,' with no single person, including a Board member, able to unilaterally approve or reject a license. Verified: the criterion every submission is checked against is the Open Source Definition, version 1.9, last modified 22 March 2007, whose ten points include free redistribution, required access to source code, permission for derived works, and rules against discriminating against persons, groups or fields of endeavor. A license that has not completed this process, such as the source-available licenses documented elsewhere in this batch, is not thereby illegitimate; it has simply not passed this named, checkable procedure, which is a narrower and more useful fact than a general claim about 'how open' a license feels.

The operating cost

Checking a license against the approved list costs nothing but the time to look; the list and the definition are both published without charge. Estimated: the cost that matters to a founder is downstream, not in checking the list but in what an unapproved license might mean for a platform, marketplace or enterprise customer that requires OSI approval as a procurement condition, a requirement this entry does not itself state exists anywhere but that a founder should ask their own counterparties about directly.

The stop condition

A license's non-approved status does not expire on its own; it changes only if the license is resubmitted and completes the process the page describes, ending in a Board vote either way. For a founder, the practical stop condition on treating 'OSI-approved' as a meaningful signal is checking the current list at the time of the decision, since the list itself is a living document that can add entries between checks.

• Is the license attached to this dependency actually on OSI's current approved list, or only widely assumed to be?
• Does any partner, platform or customer contract require OSI approval specifically, rather than 'open source' generally?
• If a license failed or never entered review, does the review page's public discussion explain why?

OSI approval is a status a license earns through a named process, not a synonym for permissive or trustworthy. Treating the two as interchangeable erases the distinction the process exists to draw.