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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?"
Open source has a long ways to go to match the number of different closed source licenses and eulas. Amateurs....
Why does the large number of licenses have to be a management problem? Most the proliferation in business is the usage, not the development of open source, and a bulk of the open source licenses say you can use it however you want, it's only when you distribute it (Modified or unmodified) that you have to start worrying about exactly what is in the license.
I'm pretty sure there are no 1000+ OSI approved licenses.
10 OSI approved licenses probably cover 90% of all open source.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Yeah, I knew you could. The average Linux distribution doesn't have anything close to a 1000 licenses in it. Stop being ridiculous. There is pretty much BSD/MIT/X11, GPL, LGPL, Mozilla, Artistic, and maybe a couple of others, depending on what apps are installed.
And in the end -- so what? FOSS licenses break down into two categories: BSD-type and GPL-type. That's it. They're all pretty much the same, especially ones that conform to the Open Source Definition, so who cares?
My blog
Ignore it.
Its no different for proprietary software, in which the number of licenses is basically equal to the number of pieces of software you have ordered.
They cover a broad range of licensing needs. If there are hundreds of different licenses out there, it's only because the lawyers working for the firms involved have sold these companies on the notion that they need a custom-crafted license.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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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.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
If you use open source software, and not redistribute it you can mostly ignore the open source license. You can use it on as many computers as you like with many strange license combinations. For closed commercial software you have to track all the licenses, for open source you do not have to track the number of uses.
The real question begins if you want to distribute a packet of open source software and want to know if they are license compatible. ANd the real trouble starts if you want to use a loophole of some license to sell it bundled it together with your own commercial software.
Why does everyone love the GPL? By forcing users of the code to obey the hacker ethic, it's breaking the hacker ethic. Code is code, and it doesn't make any sense to put restrictions at all on it, even if they're just copyleft restrictions. BSD for me- it's basically public domain (the best solution IMO) but it strokes my ego by making sure my name is included in the code :)
How about commercial licences? At least with FOSS you have a few major ones. With commercial every one is unique and usually much more complicated.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Don't most open source licenses have one thing in common: you can use the software and install it on as many computers as you want free of charge. The problem comes up when you modify the code and then want to redistribute it. My question is how many businesses are modifying tons of different programs so that they have to worry about tons of different licenses? And if your company is big enough that you are modifying tons of programs then don't you have legal department with an army of high priced lawyers who would love to do nothing else but make sure you dotted all your i's and crossed your t's when it comes to the licenses? Maybe I missed something.
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Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
See the flamewar on the OSI mailing lists; all the above concerns and more have been aired.
No, seriously... large complex component-based software system + GPL = instant holy wars, because the line where one work ends and another begins is no longer clear.
"Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not an attorney!", but it seems to me that in practice, the GPL's process-boundary condition becomes little more than a performance issue because you have to use message passing over some kind of communications link instead of loading in-process. For additional flavor, release the "client side" of the message passing bits under the AFL or similar, and the "server side" obligingly under the GPL.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
You're oversimplifying things. Some free software is gratis (free of charge), some is libre (free to modify), some is both, some allows commercial distribution, some doesn't, and the list goes on. Since people own the copyright, people are allowed to write their own software licenses, no matter how weird they might be. Some projects need to be commercially viable in order to be accepted as standards (X.Org and the X11 license), while others would rather be shielded from commercial abuse (GNU and friends). Diversity in software licenses, even if it might be a bit confusing, is a lot better than the alternative.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've had the idea for a while that it would be cool to design some kind of formal language to describe licenses, so that you could apply logical rules to cancel out conflicting requirements and determine whether licenses are compatible with each other.
Sure, legalese is pretty "formal", but it's not computer-science *formal*. How cool would that be to encode laws and legal conditions such that they are provably effective?
Someone must have done something like this...
(That said, I've never really understood why people choose licenses other than BSD or GPL, since these seem to express some basic viewpoints on how F/OSS should work, but I guess people have their own reasons, which is fine with me actually.)
I represented an company that had developed a closed source software product that had incorporated several open source (but not GPL'ed) libraries, each released under a different license.
There was a transaction cost, in that the company had to pay my law firm to review each license to be sure the distribution of the product did not violate the license. Some of the licenses had attribution requirements, including one which required the verbatim reproduction of the open source license within the distribution. I advised my client as such, and they included that license within a readme file, complete with the glaring typos that were in the original.
The cost of a junior lawyer spending a few hours reviewing six different licenses (approx $300 per hour) was lower than recreating the code from scratch -- so it is hard to argue that the proliferation of licenses is problematic. My client was still better off than if it had to spend an extra week of development time authoring the libraries.
I disagree with you in the hacker ethic part[1], although I can see your point. More importantly though is the fact that I agree with you and disagree with parent when he said "just use GPL". *I* am all for the GPL but can perfectly see why people would prefer some other license, especially a BSD/MIT/ISC one (free, non-copyleft with attribution). This "license proliferation" thing is not IMO something terrible. It can be a bit overkill, especially in the non-copyleft ones (many licenses ammount to the same with different wordings) but if people use them then clearly they have a good reason to exist. It should especially not be used as a way to promote "unification" around a single license: there are reasons for using the GPL, which I personally think are good ones, as there are reasons for using the BSD license, and that's all there is to it. Conditioning choice in the name of simplification is not the way to go at all.
:)
[1] Pardon my laconic answer but I think that everyone is up-to-date in what regards the differences in perspective about the GPL and the BSD licenses from each "camp"
This article is semi-FUD, anyway. FTFA: Business users of open source software should review their Open Source licensing agreements, audit their use of Open Source and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code. Which a business that is distributing code is doing anyway, via their legal department, outside counsel, and/or consultants. This issue has been highlighted in some open source discussion forums, but it is largely being ignored by IT and business leaders. Because the licenses are generally human readable by IT leaders, and business leaders have lawyers to handle that.
The general attitude in the OSS world that I'm picking up is that license proliferation is not a major problem. Choice is supposed to be good, no? Find the license that best satisfies your needs, or write your own. The two camps that seem to have the most concern about too many licenses are the FUD-spinners trying to damage OSS or the Free-bies that are trying to steer everyone towards GPL 3 and FSF hegemony. (Yes, I'm a bit biased.)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
There are two completely separate cases:
Using Software
With Free Software, this is always allowed. No problem.
With Proprietary software, this can be pretty complicated. Each piece of software has its own license with its own requirements, be it per-user licensing, per-seat licensing, per-CPU licensing, per-year licensing. Better hire a dedicated lawyer to make sure you have all your licenses lined up right.
Modifying/Redistributing Software
With Free Software, this can be pretty complicated. There are a number of licenses - some of which are incompatible with each other. You'll probably want to put some effort into license tracking, or even hire a lawyer if your situation is especially complicated.
With Proprietary software, this is always prohibited. No problem. (unless you screw up somehow, then you're liable for millions in damages.)
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I can see it now:
public MyLicense extends BSD implements Attribution;
or
public NPL extends GPL implements OwnerTakeback;
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
So? Look for opportunities to drive up the asshat's costs. You offer it for free, he charges, so he must be adding value. If he is not, then let him have the suckers......
If he is adding value, then you still have some options. The first is to look for features he includes and reimplement them in your project free. THis drops his value to $0. The second is to get the community development rolling fast enough that he is effectively forced to fork and move on or start contributing back so as not to be buried in trying to merge his changes back into the code.
Most of the large BSDL projects I have been around have a few players who do sell versions with a few new features. Most of the time, the community doesn't *want* those features, such as EnterpriseDB's Oracle compatibility stuff. PostgreSQL, of course, has such a pace of development that none of these companies actually want to maintain any more patches than they have to. Hence they contribute everything possible back.
In short, you contribute to a GPL program becaue you are required to. YOu contribute to a BSD program to drive the competition's prices up and yours down. They both achieve similar ends. Why care?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
See that....that's the point flying 15 feet over your head.
Pretty much every single open source license allows unlimited usage and copying, even to third parties. I'm not aware of a single one that limits this. I'm also not aware of a single one that places restrictions on copying modified versions internally.
Unless there's one I'm missing, the only limits any open source license places on a licensee is when they create derivative works, and then distribute said works to third parties.
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