Thanks for mentioning, @jan. I'll watch this issue.

https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#adding-a-license
Looks like it meets 1, but likely none of the others

Happy to catalog BlueOak-1.0.0 here when it meets criteria linked to above.

For convenience a crude search currently gets 506 hits.

(I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice)

I strongly disagree with this.

It is better to suggest well known and widely used licenses.

The Blue Oak license is rarely used (and when it is used, it's mostly as a template for other licenses).

Also, consider the idea that Mitchell might be a bit biased about this. The opinion of other lawyers too is needed.

I am not a lawyer, but as evidence of the fact that MIT is hard to read, Mitchell claims that it is hard to read and cites his own guide to the MIT license: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line.html

However, I'd argue that such guide doesn't help his point at all, because pretty much all that he wrote in such guide is obvious from reading the MIT license.

Then he claims:

In other words, if you use someone’s software under MIT or BSD and share a copy without including their copyright notices and license terms, they can sue you for infringement, since the open source license no longer applies to you.

This, however, is (I'd argue) is exactly as intended. The MIT license has one easy to follow condition.

He also cites the huge amount of variants of MIT and BSD. But this is only a problem if one qualifies their license only with "BSD" (which should never be done). In pretty much every case I've seen of projects claiming to be under the MIT license, it has been the same version of the license and all of the widely known licenses which are sometimes referred to as "MIT license" are essentially equivalent.

In addition, what license is used is clear because as long as the license is included in the project. And even if it is not (but it should) the SPDX identifier, if provided, identifies the specific license being used.

As for the contributors part, the assumption that contributions are under the same license as the project is widespread in the OS community. It is justified by community norm and as an industry standard. In practice, it's clear from the fact that provided commits represent a version of the repository including the same license and the contribution is provided for inclusion. See: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/authorship/

The standard mechanism for contributing to an open source project is the submission of a pull request, which entails re-copying the entire repository along with the contributed changes, together with all of the project’s existing documentation, when submitting the contribution. Through this mechanism, a contributor is formally publishing the contribution under the license of the project.

Also, the MIT and BSD licenses have been evaluated and considered free by Debian and the FSF as well. Only licenses which are clearly FLOSS according to everyone should be suggested. The Blue Oak license has only been evaluated by OSI.

Note: I am not against merely listing the license when it does meet the necessary criteria.
But I believe the suggested licenses on the homepage should be the most common ones and ones which have been evaluated and accepted by the FLOSS community as a whole. The most influential entities for evaluation are the FSF (steward of the free software definition), OSI (steward of the open source definition) and Debian (widely influential, adopts both terms, is usually more restrictive than both OSI and FSF, is considered fully free by the FSF, and was the foundation for the open source definition).

https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#adding-a-license
Looks like it meets 1, but likely none of the others

Quoting 2:

The license must be listed on one of the following approved lists of licenses:

• List of OSI approved licenses
• GNU's list of free licenses (note: the license must be listed in one of the three "free" categories)

Just wrote to licensing@fsf.org an application to review the BlueOak-1.0.0.

I received the [gnu.org #1760802] ticket there.
GNU volunteer <ineiev> updated state of the review on 30 Sep 2021:

Thank you for checking in on this. License review is a resource
intensive process, often requiring the involvement of legal counsel.
As such, we have a backlog of requests for review. This license is
already on the queue, but I unfortunately cannot give an estimate as
to when that review will be completed. Thanks again for checking in,
and I hope this helps.

Since I just made a similar point on another issue let me agree with @Aspie96's point:

It is better to suggest well known and widely used licenses.

Like I wrote a year ago:

Happy to catalog BlueOak-1.0.0 here when it meets criteria linked to above.

Feel free to submit a PR.

Closing this issue as changing "recommendation" is a long way off.

FWIW, the BlueOak model license just got OSI approval: spdx/license-list-XML#2352

Happy to catalog BlueOak-1.0.0 here when it meets criteria linked to above.

Now onto the requirement number 3:

For convenience a crude search currently gets 506 hits.

The search syntax has changed, and now this query returns 0 results sadly.

This search currently returns 35 results, fwiw

Although it was pretty clear that the license was permissive, it's interesting to see that it got OSI approval, so thanks @sskras for reporting this.

638 results supporting license extensions: https://github.com/search?q=%22Blue+Oak+Model+License%22+path%3A**%2FLICENSE*&type=code&ref=advsearch

That contains quite a bit of false positives.

I used Regexp syntax to avoid descending into directories: "Blue Oak Model License" path:/^LICENSE.*$/
It gives 333 matches.

But that also contains some false positives.

So I tried refining it: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 path:/^(LICENSE|COPY).*$/
But this says to find 305 files at the moment, which is clearly wrong.

Wrong query, wrong results or probably both at the same time.

That's because a year ago I already had collected 616 repos by using the old version of GitHub search:
https://github.com/sskras/license-test/blob/master/repo-list-using-blueoak.md#the-main-list:~:text=2023%2D02%2D07%20Updated%2C%20now%20616%20(%2B%2024)%20items.
(Please scroll two lines above that anchor)

So I tried a generic query with a bunch of exceptions: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 path:/^[^\/]+$/ NOT "osiApproved" NOT "Project ID" NOT ".json" NOT spdx-license-list NOT Apache-2.0 NOT "Parity Public License" NOT "Round Robin Software License" NOT "Apache License"
This returns me 662 files at the moment.

But even this result cannot be trusted. I simplified the query down to: "Blue Oak Model License" path:/^COPYING.*$/
And it says 3 files while presenting me list of 9 files out of which 4 come from the forked repos, which leaves us with 5 unique files.

So the number is not to be trusted much.