Open MPI license submitted for Open Source Intitative approval

[McCoy Smith]

Just a note to the user base:
I this week submitted the Open MPI license (which has a SPDX identifier of BSD-3-Clause-Open-MPI in part because it is a variant of the BSD 3-Clause license) for inclusion in the list of Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source licenses.

You can see the discussion thread here: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2025-May/thread.html (unfortunately, they don't index by thread but by month, so the discussion may continue over into to later month archives). If you want to comment on the submission, you'd need to be a subscriber to the OSI license-review mailing list.

The submission lays out why I thought it was important to have this license improved: it has some beneficial features that aren't found in plain BSD 3-clause, that I think non Open MPI user might found of value.

I indicated that Open MPI is the steward of this license (which I believe it to be); I'm not sure if anyone on this list continues to steward the license (which is over 20 years old, AFAIK), but if you have opinions on this submission, you may want to provide them to the OSI mailing list.

McCoy Smith

Lex Pan Law LLC

[Jeff Squyres]

Wow, cool!  Many thanks for doing that.

I can probably be contacted with questions, but I am most definitely not a lawyer.

Per the 2nd and 3rd messages on that thread, do you need me to join that list?  If so, I’d probably join it for limited time (i.e., just for the duration of that discussion).

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to users+un...@lists.open-mpi.org.

-- 

{+} Jeff Squyres

[McCoy Smith]

up to you if you want to or not. TBH I doubt there is going to be a lot of discussion this license is pretty straightforward and I don't see any reason for the list to have any issues.

[McCoy Smith]

FWIW if there is any objection to me doing this from Open MPI, let me know as I'd want to let OSI know. I'm assuming you wouldn't but don't know for sure.

On 5/21/2025 2:34 PM, Jeff Squyres wrote:

[Jeff Squyres]

No objections from my part.  I can’t imagine anyone would object, but I’ll ask in the dev community as well.

If there are any questions / discussion where you need someone from our side to answer comments, let me know and I can join the discussion on the OSI list.

[McCoy Smith]

Looks like Brian Barrett has chimed in, as an original developer of Open MPI:

Josh –

 

I’m one of the original developers for the Open MPI project and one of the few from the early days still involved in the project.  I’m happy to answer any questions you have about the history of the license, although I speak for myself personally and not for Amazon or the entire Open MPI project.  Our intention has always been to be Open Source and I think we just missed trying to work through this process in the last 20 years.  I would definitely support adding the license to the approved list if the review process recommends it, and suspect that the rest of the community would be as well.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian Barrett