How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday February 16, 2009 @05:22AM from the he-should-start-an-organization-or-six dept.

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."

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Re:Hi again by gclef · 2009-02-16 05:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.