That's two and neither has authority to provide *advance approval* for anew license. [...]
If -legal agree the licence is free, then I suspect ftpmaster is unlikely to bounce it when shown the discussion. If it gets in the first time, that's no promise that it wasn't a buggy review. We might spot an unnoticed problem later. One of the strengths of debian-legal seems to be the ability to revisit old mistakes and fix them, IMO. That happens when things get refused in error or confusion, too. That's far better than making errors and then defending them beyond the point of absurdity.
The speed of lawyers is a problem and it would be nice to see questionable things shown to debian-legal before they are used in anger. I don't see how we can speed the lawyers up, though. If you just want to document some advice for people drawing up licences about how they can use debian-legal, please go for it and work with those of us who are interested.
Maybe ftpmaster could be encouraged to make more public statements to groups like apache, but I think they're pretty busy already, so I can understand why they might not.
Not quite and not quiet. I just took for granted that there was not a one-to-one mapping between non-non-free and "free software".
Huh? -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef@jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/