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OSI Hopes To Decrease Number of Licenses

Posted by timothy on from the but-licenses-are-art-in-themselves dept.

Noksagt writes "Various outlets report that the OSI may cut down the increasing number of Open Source licenses. Right now there are about 50 approved licenses; incompatible licenses confuse and impede developers and end users alike. The OSDL has been pushing hard for this at LinuxWorld. Sam Greenblatt, a member of the OSDL board, said 'Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL, and, of course, there will be the BSD because you can't rid of it.'"

1 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can they do this? by JoeBuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    You're free to write whatever license you want; they are free to refuse to certify it.

    The problem with the proliferation of licenses is that you can't mix and match software. Right now there are basically three types of open source (or free software) licenses:

    • Copyleft. The GPL fits this category, as do a few other licenses like the OSL, IBM CPL, etc. Some of these exist for no other reason than to have something like the GPL without Stallman's rhetoric, but since the drafters weren't careful to maintain compatibility of conditions, you can't mix and match code.
    • Copyleft restricted to a body of code; the code can be linked to other code that uses other licenses or is even proprietary. LGPL, MPL (Mozilla), and a whole host of licenses that differ just slightly from the MPL because some corporate lawyer wanted to fine-tune. Where the licenses conflict, you can still mix and match code as long as you preserve file or library boundaries.
    • Non-copyleft (MIT/BSD style licenses).

    These licenses differ from each other on technicalities, and on what happens with patents, or because someone wants to tweak a boundary case. Some of them give a privileged position to the original contributor, some don't.

    The community would be better off if we could just get down to three basic license choices, and the use of "special exception" clauses where needed. For companies that want special privilege (like the ability to use code plus fixes using other licenses), they can ask for copyright assignment of contributions, and treat contributors well enough that they actually get it.