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OSI Hopes To Decrease Number of Licenses
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.'"
What exactly would a commercial GPL be like? Doesn't that kind of go against the grain and nature of the GPL? Because when I think commercial I think "We made a change, then closed it, now we won't let you know what that change is or how it affects other GPL'd software"
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
I can create any damn kind of license that I want. What are they going to do. Claim it is not "Open Source" by changing the definition of Open Source. Sure it is confusing but all the different licenses exist because someone finds the GPL or the BSD license doesn't support how they want software to be distributed. Fix people then you can fix this mess.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I'll admit, I'm not quite sure what the "Commercial GPL" is, but I really hope that LGPL isn't eliminated. [The LGPL allows users to use a library, and not release your code that uses the library. Changes to the library source itself must be released].
Let's say I have a write a game that uses the popular library, LibSDL (a rendering library). Though open-source may be great, why should I be *forced* to GPL my game code, which has little to do with LibSDL development?
Though I understand the ideas behind all these licenses, it occurs to me how amusing it is that if something was truly 100% free, it wouldn't have or need a license at all. BSD comes closest to that.
In order to host your project on SourceForge it must use an OSI-conforming license. If the list of OSI-conforming licenses is drastically reduced what will happen to all the projects on SourceForge which don't use the GPL or BSD licenses? Will they just be booted off the server? Forced to switch licenses?
What they are doing is branding the term "Open Source" and this will not change the meaning of "open source" (note small "o" and small "s"). One of the big problems in software licensing in general is that every license is different in subtle or sometimes huge ways. If you want to do any sort of development that involves integration of pieces of other software, it can get quite complicated quickly.
Does this mean that you can't make your own license? Of course not. What it means is that if you want their official seal of approval, you likely won't get it.
I think 3 licenses might pass as a sort of Platonic ideal, but I can't really see that covering all needs in the real world. However, establishing a base line of a few simple licenses could make life much easier for smaller developers that don't really have an interest in paying a lawyer to craft them something more complex.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
BSD will always stick around, because there are some of us who view the BSD lisences as MORE free: someone can create a derivitive work without having significant liscence restrictions on that derivative work.
I work on computer security. I don't like viruses, either in my code or in the liscencing.
Test your net with Netalyzr
What's wrong with BSD? It's GPL, without requiring release of source code, even if you distribute a revised, executable version. It's not as viral, but many developers don't require that perpetuation, and many developers require that source we use not require that perpetuation. It shouldn't - and won't - disappear, because it has a very useful function.
--
make install -not war
Maybe it's time for the "Open Source" movement to die. After all, the founders of this movement (Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Parens, I'm lookin' at you) havn't had anything official to say about Open Source in a while (oh wait, there was that Java thing, you're ok Bruce). I thought "to reduce confusion" was what the Open Source movement set out to achieve, being that Free Software just wasn't straight forward enough for them. The result of this mess has been one person after another putting the "openness" of the source code ahead of the freedom to modify and redistribute the source code (yes, Microsoft, Sun, X11, Apache, and that worm who wrote the packet filter the OpenBSD project rewrote in a week). It's amazing to me the number of people who have no problem understanding exactly what I'm talking about when I say Free Software, compared to the number of people who are now confused about Open Source. Maybe it's the use of capital letters. Ahh, what irony that is, we could have avoided endless debates about Free Software vs Open Source if we'd just capitalized "free".
How we know is more important than what we know.
If they had required that new licenses bring some real benefit to the community of users and developers, rather than merely benefitting the company which proposes it, there wouldn't be 58 licenses.
I don't think that 58 licenses is necessarily too many, but 58 infitesimally different, bad licenses is definitely too many.
I think that OSI can't afford to dump on the people whose licenses they've certified, so this talk of reducing the number of licenses to 3 is silly. I think that they could afford to deprecate most of those 58 (e.g., ``That license is still certified, but only for software which was issued under that license before Nonuary 2006.''), and make sure that they are a little more selective about what they approve in the future.
See what I've been reading.
Businesses don't like the rant at the beginning, but do like the terms and conditions.
... and you really can't stop people from making bad choices.
Since editors are overused as an example, lets try CD burners. There are two that most people will know: k3b and nautilus. Yet a quick search on freshmeat will return literally dozens of CD burners. Why did those authors write a CD burner when excellent ones already existed? Maybe for experience, maybe due to a missing feature... it doesn't matter. The point is they can, so they will.
Choosing an open-source licence is the same: There are a couple basic smart choices, but there is no way you're going to get everybody to agree to only use them. As a random example, one of the programs I use is only free if the kernel of the computer you run it on is open source, weird huh? It is the OSI's job to try and simplify things as much as possible so people can understand what's going on. Sure, they can discourage wacky choices, but they shouldn't be outlawing them from the OSS definition.
PS: A google for licen{s,c}e returns the GPL as the number one hit.
Yes, different developers have different needs. But much of the cruft that passes for alternative licenses these days ultimately is unnecessary and incompatable with other licenses for the sake of being so. A Solaris user will not, when the OS is opened, be able to include code from Darwin and redistribute the results. An X.org user cannot include parts of XFree86 and redistribute the results. There's little reason for this: Sun and Apple want to distribute closed code and aren't willing to work with each other. Some of XFree86's developers unilaterally decided that the usual copyright attributions weren't credit enough for their work. None of these really have much to do with the type of code being written.
It sucks. It's hard to figure something's "free software" if you're not allowed to include code from other "free software" and still treat it as free software. Incompatable licenses undermine software freedom.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now before people starting giving out about the Fink, he is one of people who got HP to start supporting Linux (and especially Debian). And has done a lot of evangelical work for Linux, Open Source, & Free Software.
He also talked a little about software patents, and how that even if one disagrees with them that one still need to pay attention to them. And that it's not the fact that one has patented something, but what one does with a patent that counts. Only problem with this is that any of us came up with a great software patentable idea, we probably couldn't afford the fees involved in patenting something and then allowing free use of it.
Fink is the head of Linux services at HP, he is also VP or director at OSDL, see his bio at the Linux Expo site.
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
If your license genuinely embodies another distribution/licensing system for free software (other than copyleft and effective public domaining), I'm sure they won't have a problem adding your license to the list that they encourage people to use (after it is properly checked), but most licenses are just rewordings of old ideas (with a new person/company's name at the top).
The current number of licenses causes confusion (for prospective licensors and licensees); encourages people to write even more licenses (without properly considering alternatives, and without making sure they are legally watertight or make sense); and, worst of all, means that licenses exist which are effectively the same as each other but are incompatible (which discourages the mix-and-match creative commons which is the primary reason for software freedom in the first place).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
WTF?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The GPL is not viral. It does not infect software of its own accord. You make a choice whether or not to include other people's code in your software, and if you do so, you must abide by the conditions under which the author of said code released it. If you don't like that, don't include the other person's code. It's really as simple as that.
To quote you: "dont bash it or those that choose to use it."
>>Or does your reasoning apply only to everyone else except the GPL?
No. It applies to everyone equally. You clearly haven't read my post.
I would support any license that is genuinely different from those that currently exist. As you seem interested in the GNU GPL, I will use that as an example.
The GNU GPL embodies a particularly system called copyleft. As it was the first copyleft license (and is legally watertight) it is unnecessary to create further licenses which effectively do the same thing. Indeed, it is a bad idea, because they would be incompatible (so that people have to needlessly do the same work again), cause confusion, and wouldn't have stood the test of time and many legal eyeballs (as the GNU GPL has).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
They're free to redefine "OSI Approved" (their trademark) however they see fit until only Sun's CDDL and MSFT's Shared Source are OSI Approved; and I'm free to ignore their silly games and continue to use FSF approved licenses instead.
The way that I see it there are 4 types of licenses, and within each type there are all kinds of variations.
** Truely Free - Incorporate the code into open or closed projects:
- BSD style licenses
** Forced Open - You can only incorporate the code into projects where both the new and old code is also Forced Open:
- GPL
** Kept Open - You can incorporate the code as long as you keep the the original code and modifications to it open as well, but code not related to the original code can be licensed as desired:
- LGPL
** Dual licensed ( commercial/open) - You can incorporate the code as per one of the open licenses or you can pay to use the product under some other license.
So, I think the first thing is to identify the different classifications of licenses and then for each class identify compatible and incompatable terms of the different licenses. Then they can start working on generic class licenses.
I personally think that the FSF should review compatability of/with the GPL. Right now, the only code that is compatable with GPL is code that can be relicensed under the GPL. I would love to see the compatablity extended to allow compatability with other licenses which force the resulting code to be also be open. This would allow mixing of GPL code with Sun's CDDL where the the resulting code would not be under a single license but all open and usable for future development.
"'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.'"
How about... there will be BSD because its the only FAIR license that allows ANYONE to use the code? Bah.
While there is doubtlessly reasons for all the licenses you mention, they are not all now currently OSI certified or "Free."
1. The license of Qmail is not a free software or an OSI Certified license because it mostly prohibits the distribution of modified versions.
2. Aladdin, too, does not fit license because it does not allow charging for distribution, and largely prohibits simply packaging software licensed under it with anything for which a charge is made.
3. Only the "new" BSD license is considered Free/Open Source
7. None of the no commercial use variants are free/open source, as they discrimiante against fields of endeavor.
Really, I don't see a huge problem with the number of software licenses -- GPL is by far the most popular, and people who aren't using GPL for new projects presumably are doing so for strong ideological, commercial, or practical reasons, and won't just change their minds.
What is a big problem is the proliferation of free-information licenses for books, documentation, etc. The GFDL really should have a stake driven through its heart, since it's even been rejected by Debian, which I would've considered the constituency most likely to love and cherish it in the first place. Apart from the invariant sections, it's too long, has an annoying political preamble, and it's hard to interpret. Unfortunately, Wikipedia uses the GFDL, so I don't think it's going away soon.
So here we have seven (I think) versions of CC, plus GFDL, plus OPL (which is dying now that its originator has thrown in his lot with CC), and even some other licenses people use for books and docs, like the design science license (IIRC). That's just way too many licenses. (And CC was even at one point discussing a license only for academic use -- yech.)
Actually if you browse the catalog of free books in my sig, you'll see that the situation is even worse than that. A lot of authors of free books don't even seem to know that copyleft licenses exist for books and docs.
For example, they put up their book with no license, which means that it's illegal to copy it (theoretically even illegal to download it, since that's making a copy!), and as soon as they get tired of hosting the book on a server, the book will evaporate, and can never be legally brought back by anyone else.
You'll also see people using software licenses like GPL for books, which is lame, or making them public domain (or stating on their web page that they're public domain, but then making it clear that they don't understand what public domain is, or why copyleft might be preferable). And the noncommercial flavors of CC are lame, too. A CC-nc book is really no more free than the free AOL disk you get in the mail. As soon as a CC-nc book's author gets tired of serving it up, it's gone forever.
IMO, the most important thing is just to get the word out to non-geeks that the CC licenses exist. It doesn't help that commoncontent.org, which had been one of the biggest boosters of CC, seems to have gone semi-dormant -- new submissions no longer seem to get processed. I've had one waiting to get listed for a couple of months now. Apparently they've had problems with spam submissions, and have just kind of thrown up their hands.
Find free books.
Doesn't the BSD licence allow anyone to use their code, whether it be an open or closed source project? What happens if a programmer doesn't want their code to be used by developers who don't share the same "philosophy" that they do? Is that fair to them? No, so they use one of the other licences, which will be more compatable with their goals for their code.
I can imagine the outrage there would be here if Microsoft announced that software had to be one of three specific licenses to be "Windows certified".
All this will do is alienate businesses that might have opened their source with their own licenses and cause them to either not open their source at all, or just ignore the OSI completely (thereby removing any power the organization might have had).
I personally think that the FSF should review compatability of/with the GPL. Right now, the only code that is compatable with GPL is code that can be relicensed under the GPL.
:)
Well, that's kind of the point.
That's the GPL. You don't have to give away your sources and binaries for free, you just have to include the sources (and the right to modify, redistribute, etc.) to all parties who receive the binaries from you. Hell, RMS used to charge $100 just for emacs, and they still charge more than a grand for GNU.
Except in certain specific circumstances involving derivative works, the GPL never requires you to distribute binaries and sources to anyone in particular; you alone decide the criteria for distributing your work. If you want to charge $3000 for your GPLd CRM solution, feel free. You don't have to offer free downloads or sources to people who haven't bought them from you.
So, again, what would you change about the GPL to make it "commercial", since you can already make the receipt of sources and binaries contingent on purchase?
All's true that is mistrusted
That's incorrect. The GPL license forces you to share.
Only if you modify someone else's code. If you don't like it, you can write your own code instead of misappropriating someone else's.
Is this really so hard for you to understand? If you're going to use some other person's stuff, you have to do it under the terms and conditions they set. This is something most of us learned when we were small children: when you borrow your friend's toys, and he says not to leave them outside, then you do just as he says. Or were you the kind of kid that decided to "borrow" other kids' toys and break them?
None of the examples I gave included the GPL. The GPL is a neutral copyleft. The major problem is not the neutral licenses, but the licenses from groups like Apple and Sun who want to treat modifications to code they've produced as "owned" by them. The result is that different projects cannot share code.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.