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

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.