FOSS License Proliferation Adding Complexity

E5Rebel writes "Business is embracing open source like never before, but the effective demise of SCO's claims against Linux doesn't mean an end to licensing problems, an analyst warns. The debate on Slashdot seems to focus on the GPL and its virtues, but there are 1,000-plus open source licenses (according to analyst Saugatuck), and businesses face having to manage multiple licenses within a single open source product. What can be done to minimize multiple-license pain for corporate open source adopters?"

Comments

Strawman

[fishthegeek]

Check out Microsofts License-o-rama! If Microsoft as a corporation can't stick to even a few licenses what on earth makes anyone think that thousands of FLOSS programmers will share enough commonality among them that they would be willing to use fewer licenses.

Microsofts licensing site doesn't even address the individual EULA's for products. Each MS product has a license that is nearly always unique to that product. So I say let those that do the work decide on how they would like or not like to share it.

The un-problem

[MisterBad]

The vast majority of businesses will never trigger _any_ of the provisions of the licenses for their Open Source software because they will not publicly re-distribute the software in verbatim or modified form.

For those businesses that do, it is highly unlikely that they'll deal with more than the GPL or BSD licenses. Other licenses are important only for a single package or cluster of packages (e.g. the MPL, the Artistic License, or the Apache license), and companies that deal with these packages tend to be specialists in that area.

This just really isn't a practical problem for most businesses. It's an issue that software aggregators like distros or SourceForge need to deal with, but not your normal everyday business.

Well, yes and no.

[jd]

Yes, you're absolutely right that there are only a few "core" licenses that others are derived from. NASA's Open Source license is based on the GPL, for example. However, there ARE a lot of licenses out there. It would be far, far better if there was some sort of inheritance mechanism for licenses. That way, it would be clear what had borrowed what from what, lawyers would be dealing with change sets (which they're familiar with) rather than re-written texts, and instead of a long linear list, we would have a much more compact tree.

Would this reduce the number of licenses? Initially, no. You'd simply reorganize them into a structure. Would it improve understanding of the licenses? Yes. Understanding would increase exponentially, rather than linearly, as a person worked their way through. Would it eventually lead to a reduction in the number of licenses? Yes. A lot of them have trivial or insignificant change sets and making this obvious to all would create pressure to consolidate where appropriate.

Ok, but doesn't the sheer number also create pressure? Yes, but it may NOT always be appropriate, and there may be unexpected and undesirable results. Make thing clear FIRST, and THEN make changes, not the other way round.

Re:Can you say FUD?

[LiquidFire_HK]

I wrote a quick script to find the most-used licenses (this is from Gentoo's packages, which is a fairly representative sample, with nearly 12 000 packages).

$ eix -v | grep License | awk '{print $2}' | perl -e 'while(<>){ chomp; $licenses{$_}=0 unless $licenses{$_}; $licenses{$_}++ } for (sort {$licenses{$b} <=> $licenses{$a}} keys %licenses) { print "$_ $licenses{$_}\n" }' | head
GPL-2 6710
BSD 711
as-is 579
LGPL-2.1 511
|| 428
Artistic 344
MIT 259
LGPL-2 229
public-domain 138
PHP 124

You can see the full list here. As you can see, a huge amount of the packages (85%+) use GPL or one of the other very popular licenses. "||" means multi-licensed, and most of those are Artistic/GPL. You'll notice that after the top 30 licenses, none are used in more than 10 packages. Of the 863 licenses, 729 are used in 5 or less packages, and 629 of them are used in only one package. Many of the one-ofs are fonts or closed-source licenses.

So while I agree there are many licenses, the vast majority of projects use one of the popular licenses.