LICENSE PROLIFERATION

"License Proliferation" refers the problems created when additional software licenses are written for software packages. License Proliferation effects the Open Source and Free Software communities. Both of these communities have created software licenses that are intended at least in part to encourage code sharing between different developers. Often when a software developer would like to merge portions of different software programs he is unable to do so because the licenses are incompatible. When software under two different licenses can be combined into a larger software work, the licenses are said to be compatible. AS the number of licenses increase, the probability that a FOSS developer will want to merge software together that are available under incompatible licenses increase. There is also a greater cost to companies that wish to evaluate every FOSS license for software packages that they use. Strictly speaking no one is in favor of license proliferation. Rather the issue stems from the tendency for organizations to write new licenses in order to address real or perceived needs for their software releases.

Contents

Compatible Licenses

Vanity Licenses

Googles Stance

OSI Stance

FSF Stance

Other Links

Compatible Licenses

The Free Software Foundation who maintains the GPL also maintains a list of the licenses that are compatible with the GPL. Another popular FOSS license is the Apache License, the Apache Foundation has a page discussing the fact that the Apache License is listed as incompatible with the GPL.

Vanity Licenses

Vanity Licenses is a term that refers to a license that is written by a company or person for no other reason than to write their own license. If a new license is created that has no obvious improvement or difference over another more common FOSS license it can often be criticised as a vanity license. Danese Cooper mentions on her blog that Intel requested its vanity license withdrawn from OSI approval.

Googles Stance

Google took a significant step in combating license proliferation by limiting the licenses that its source repository system would accept to seven licenses:

★ Apache License 2.0

★ Artistic License (used by often by the Perl community)

★ GNU General Public License 2.0

★ GNU Lesser Public License

★ MIT License

★ Mozilla Public License 1.1

★ New BSD License
Ed Burnette talked with Greg Stien (a Google employee at the time) to create an interview regarding Googles decision to fight license proliferation

OSI Stance

(Open Source Initiative) OSI consider themselves the keepers of what licenses can be called open source. They maintain a list of Licenses that are OSI Approved Licenses. Some including Mark Shuttleworth argue that the OSI is largely responsible for the license proliferation problem by contining to accept new licenses. However the OSI started the License Proliferation Project which is working on a License Proliferation Report which is intended to address some of the issues with License proliferation.

FSF Stance

Ciaran O'Riordan argues that the main thing that the FSF can do to prevent license proliferation is to reduce the reasons for making new licenses in the first place, in an editorial entitled How GPLv3 tackles license proliferation. Generally the FSF consistently recommends the use of the GNU GPL as much as possible, and when that is not possible, to use GPL-compatible licenses.

Other Links

★ Open source license proliferation, a broader view by Raymond Nimmer

★ Larry Rosen argues that different licenses can be a good thing Larry Rosen

★ Licensing howto by Eric Steven Raymond