How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?

jammag writes "Bruce Perens, who wrote the original licensing rules for Open Source software in 1997, notes that there are a sprawling 73 open source licenses currently in existence. But he identifies an essential four — well, actually just two — that developers, companies, and individuals need. In essence, he cuts through the morass and shows developers, in particular, how to protect their work. (And yes, he favors GPL3 over GPL2.) For his own coding work, he's fond of the 'sharing with rules' license, which stays true to the Open Source ethos of shared code yet also enables him to get paid by companies who use it in their commercial products."

Comments

Re:Hi again

[gclef]

Hi, Bruce,

While I agree in general that there are too many licenses, one of the problems I ran into (which you mention in passing) was that I'm not necessarily the one who gets to decide what license I'm using. When I talked with my organization's lawyers, they didn't care about license proliferation...they cared only about what they thought was important. So, we ended up with a modified BSD license: the standard 3-clause plus one more to address the lawyer's concerns...personally I think the fourth clause is redundant, but I'm not a lawyer, so they weren't listening to me.

In short, while I think it's good to get this group (ie, the coders) to start agreeing on licenses, the lawyers that we talk to need a bunch of education also. They all seem to want to customize licenses.

Has The GPL Ever Been Proven

[new-black-hand]

From the article:

I want the people who extend my software to give their extensions to the world to share, the same way I gave them my original program. So, my payback for writing Open Source is that my software drives a further increase in the amount of available Open Source software, beyond my individual contribution.

Has anybody ever proven this?

ie. has it ever been proven that attaching a 'must share' clause to a license (ie. GPL vs BSD) actually results in more people sharing code.

I am inclined to think and believe, based on experience, that it does not. Those who share are likely to share regardless of license, ditto to those who take your code and improve it with no intention of sharing.

Just how much does 'sharing' contribute to open source anyway, considering that all the top projects are tightly controlled by a small number of lead developers who hold the keys to commitments and in accepting patches. Code being shared will likely just go unnoticed anyway.

So, after 10 years, has anyone proven that the GPL works?

Re:1997 ?

[Bruce Perens]

How did he 'write the rules' in 1997 when GNU & FSF long predated this?

They're the rules for the Open Source Initiative and the Debian Project to approve licensing.

Richard wrote a statement of the Four Freedoms in an early edition of the GNUs Bulletin, which was mostly distributed in paper form on the MIT campus and environs. He did not further promote them until a long time later. So, when I had to write license guidelines for Debian, the Four Freedoms document was unknown. I sent my document to Richard, and he wrote back that he felt it was a good definition of Free Software. Surprisingly, he did not mention his Four Freedoms document in that correspondence.

Much later, FSF published its statement of the Four Freedoms on its web site as an alternative to the Open Source Definition.

Bruce