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

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source has a long ways to go to match the number of different closed source licenses and eulas. Amateurs....

Re:

[Tuoqui]

You sure I thought all the closed source licenses and EULA's were cookie cutter fill in the blank ones that basically say 'We can do whatever we want and you cant sue us'.

When using them, all the licenses say the same thi

[Tyger]

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.

Plot them in a chart.

[khasim]

I'm still not seeing why the OSI hasn't developed a CHART where each license is placed based upon what it allows and what it restricts.

No, this doesn't have to be a 2 dimensional line.

Then, any gaps would be easily seen and a line could be drawn saying "all licenses below this point are compatible with the GPL v2" or whatever license you're looking at.

Then there wouldn't be a question of which license to use. Just look for which one meets your minimal requirements.

Re:When using them, all the licenses say the same

[einhverfr]

Because everyone draws lines different places and threatens legal action if you cross those lines.

The cardinal rule of *business* relating to intellectual property law is that the licene means what the licensor says it means unless and untill it becomes worth fighting in court. I run a business. IANAL.

I actually see this complexity to be a good thing. It forces licenses to compete. And it raises the likelihood of lawsuits relating to the limits of each open source license. Lawsuits (as long as I am not

Re:

[Wesley Felter]

But all open source licenses allow unlimited copying, so this is not a problem.

Re:copying is copying

[Ohreally_factor]

Wrong: Internal distribution is fine and doesn't really count as distribution regarding the GPL.

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.)

Re:

[trifish]

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.)

If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.

Re:

[harlows_monkeys]

Wrong: Internal distribution is fine and doesn't really count as distribution regarding the GPL

I don't think the person you are responding to was talking about any particular license. Internal distribution most certainly IS copying, and does require permission from the copyright owner. This is well settled in case law. GPL is widely believed to grant that permission to things that are under it.

Re:

[Ohreally_factor]

Well, I figured he was responding to the original post, which mentioned that "the bulk of OSS licenses" don't consider internal distribution to be distribution. However, if I am wrong, I stand corrected.

Minor disagreement

[einhverfr]

WHile what you say is exactly right for most OSI-approved licenses, there is at least one exception that I am aware of.

Larry Rosen's OSL requires distributing the source code of any software which is used by people outside your organization, at least by my lay reading of section 5 (IANAL). So it does seem wise to have lawyers read the licenses for hidden surprises of this sort. Of course, this doesn't add complexity for mere use because this is going to be the same for nearly every license out there (so y

Re:

[Kjella]

As far as I know, pretty much all open source licenses obligate you only to your recipients. For example, the GPL says you must give those who get the binary the source - nobody else. Sure you might copy the software but all the copies legally belong to the business, so you're sitting on both sides of the table. And if that was a problem there'd be no problem to make a little legal handwaving to make a legally separate entity do all the reproduction, while the real company only uses it.

Re:

[einhverfr]

As far as I know, pretty much all open source licenses obligate you only to your recipients.

Exactly write. Almost every one of them with only a few exceptions. Heck, I am not even going to include the AGPL because this only places restriction on modification, not obligation to users (hence blocking out requests for source, or using a proxy of some sort to send different code seems within the confines of the license).

The only real exception I can think of is Larry Rosen's OSL, which defines distribution to include external deployment (i.e. making available for use by external users).

So this mean

Re:

[watchingeyes]

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.

Re:

[jhantin]

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

Re:

[einhverfr]

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.

Allow me to summarize the OSI license-discuss flamewars (leaving out the "only my opinion is on topic here" sort of posts).

Some have pointed out that derivative works can't mean what the FSF says they mean because if it didn, every piece of software would be derivative of the OS. THey argue in line with the Eclipse Foundation's FAQ that derivative works as defined in US law require the inclusion of creative (not merely practical) content and therefore merely including a header file is probably not suffici

Re:

[Ohreally_factor]

A compatibility chart would be nice also.

1000+ ???

[someone1234]

I'm pretty sure there are no 1000+ OSI approved licenses.
10 OSI approved licenses probably cover 90% of all open source.

Re:

[Tyger]

If you count all the subtle variations (For example, BSD license with who gets credit changed) I can see it being 1000+. But that is taking a very strict definition of different FOSS licenses, and not a realistic definition that all those are basically the same thing.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

How many different closed source licenses are there? Probably about 1 for every application.

Re:

[Tyger]

Not to mention that they are all much longer than your typical open source license, and have many more land mines to worry about tripping over hidden away in the text.

Re:1000+ ???

[Knuckles]

And they are written in caps.

Re:

[vidarh]

Probably more than that - many licenses will have changed multiple times over the lifetime of the application.

Object oriented licencing?

[IPFreely]

So what we really need is a smaller set of base licenses that include object oriented features like inheritence, interfaces and templates.

I can see it now:

public MyLicense extends BSD implements Attribution;

or

public NPL extends GPL implements OwnerTakeback;

Re:

[fsmunoz]

"This is my FOSS license. If you don't like it... well, I have others (999+, more exactly)".

(apologies to the Marx Brothers).

Can you say FUD?

[morgan_greywolf]

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?

Re:

[Ant P.]

A quick check (ls -1 /usr/portage/licenses | wc -l) gives me 861. Not over 1000, but not exactly nowhere close either.

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 [rafb.net]. 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.

Re:

[budgenator]

Who care's how many licences are in your distro, it's the distro's problem; my problem is how many licences are in my app, there is three GPL v2, BSD, and PHP, that's not unmanageable.

Well, yes and no.

[jd]

Yes, you're absolutely right that there are only a few "core" licenses that others are derived from. NASA's Open Source license is based on the GPL, for example. However, there ARE a lot of licenses out there. It would be far, far better if there was some sort of inheritance mechanism for licenses. That way, it would be clear what had borrowed what from what, lawyers would be dealing with change sets (which they're familiar with) rather than re-written texts, and instead of a long linear list, we would have a much more compact tree.

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.

Re:

[Ohreally_factor]

This is actually a workable, or at least functional, idea you have. It's not trying to artificially limit the number of licenses, nor would it actually limit the number of licenses, but it would certainly narrow down most usage to those licenses that are commonly used, and discourage trivial proliferation.

Re:

[jd]

Use something everyone will love/hate equally. Arch.

But do you havea license to...

[msimm]

rock? Because when it comes right down to it I think that's all this poor analyst was looking for. Just admit it, you want to rock? You know Linus knows how to rock. John Hall looks fresh out of a Greatful Dead concert (although I was thinking more along the lines of AC/DC, but whatever man). Linux totally has the license to rock.

Do what everyone else does

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Ignore it.

Bureaucratic nonsense

[ShieldW0lf]

At some point, it will become clear that enforcing all this licensing bullshit with courts and lawyers is just a big waste of time that drains everyone dry, and they'll drop the foundational laws upon which both open and closed source licensing agreements rely.

Then the problem will go away.

I mean, it's a problem of our own making... it's like hitting yourself in the head, all you have to do is stop.

Re:

[ShieldW0lf]

I think copyright will fail because it serves the interests of those in the developed nations, not the interests of the developing nations. Copyleft depends on copyright for enforcement, but it is a subversive effort to destroy the value of holding and enforcing copyrights.

Also, those developing nations who manage to self-organize without burdening themselves with responsibility to maintain and enforce the copyright scheme will be more efficient than those that take on that burden.

Also, those who do not pr

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Unfortunately, all of your arguments overlook one small detail: without copyright, there is little incentive to develop most of the works that are produced in the world.

If you're the teenager with no money or the poor folks from the third world, then the fact that you can take the fruits of someone else's labour for free when those fruits come in digital form may not feel like theft/infringement/whatever, but the bottom line is still that someone worked to produce the material and then didn't get compensa

Re:

[Paul Fernhout]

Except that most really good stuff is a labor of love and has been made available for free -- ranging from the alphabet through the number zero to mathematical proofs and much web content (including Slashdot and other community sites). Consider:
"Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html [gnu.org]

Food and shelter used to be free for the taking and making -- except enclosure acts promulgated by rich and powerful people

number of licenses

[mattb112885]

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.

Strawman

[fishthegeek]

Check out Microsofts License-o-rama! [microsoft.com] 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.

Re:

[einhverfr]

The problem is that many of the FOSS licenses purport to extend the terms of those licenses to any software that interacts in a close manner (such as linking). IANAL, but this standard seems really suspect to me (it would mean that Microsoft could release a new version of Windows and declare that no open source software could be developed for it).

Again, when you are in business, it doesn't matter whether the FSF is wrong or not. You follow their terms even if you believe that they have no case because it

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

Ah, the standard Slashdot reply:

"Well, Linux might be bad, but Microsoft is worse!!!"

Re:

[fishthegeek]

That isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that the number of FOSS licenses is not something that exists in a vacuum, and when you look at the larger picture (what software company is larger than MS?) there is little if any difference between Floss and Proprietary software if all you look at is the number of licenses out there. Gheesh. Feeling a little defensive aren't you?

License Inheritance

[Floritard]

Why not take a note from actual software development and give licenses an inheritance hierarchy? I've always thought it was stupid that EULAs aren't standardized to a certain extent. If everyone knew a general EULA quite well, then companies could just state where their EULA differs from this common-knowledge EULA, instead of blindly clicking ok, consequences be damned. Same process could be applied to middleware licenses. One could even develope a license format whereby you could compile the various licens

Re:

[nuzak]

> Why not take a note from actual software development and give licenses an inheritance hierarchy?

The lesson of software development is that people reinvent things rather than use base classes that don't entirely meet their needs.

I bet a few dozen of those licenses are just BSD 3-clause with the name of the copyright holder changed. And besides, licensing commercial software for redistribution is even more fraught with peril. No one is educated or swayed by this filler piece of an article. Licenses ar

The un-problem

[MisterBad]

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.

Re:

[The_Wilschon]

Hey, aren't you the fellow who wrote the (net http) module for guile? Do you still have that code? If so, I'll give you an email address if you don't mind sending it to me.

Do not distribute.But use is free!

[leuk_he]

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.

Re:Do not distribute.But use is free!

[also-rr]

Excellent point... especially when you consider that if you *are* distributing it will pass through your commercial department.

I have been doing commercial work lately on over 100 contracts, each with unique terms and conditions. Even if we had projects running that used every single OSS license out there it wouldn't tax us to an unreasonable level. That is kind of what specialists are for... businesses pay programmers to programme, and the commercial department to read contracts.

The best bit is that unlike technical issues your PHB probably appreciates the importance of contracts! I can't think of a single director (even the engineering directors) where I work who couldn't assimilate the GPL in five minutes or less - and the GPL is one of the more complex licenses. They deal with stuff far more weird than this every day.

All you need is to know how to state the benefits in their language. My humble effort is here [revis.co.uk] - and I would welcome additions.

Re:

[einhverfr]

businesses pay programmers to programme, and the commercial department to read contracts.

And in the case of the GPL v3, they have no clue what it means.... Seriously, there are some really nasty easily overlooked clauses in that license. See my latest journal entry for more info.

Re:

[Duncan3]

Exactly.

If you use open source software, then you have no issues of any kind. If you are a company writing/selling software, treat other people's open source like nuclear waste, and have your users download the prerequisites themselves.

This is so very simple that we need at least 1000 more open source licenses, otherwise people will see how easy it is, and stop hiring lawyers.

Re:

[bit01]

[deleted] If you want to distribute a packet of any 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.

You shouldn't apply arguments specifically to open source software that apply equally to any software. This entire /. story is misdirected and should be titled "License Proliferation Adding Complexity."

Many commercial software astroturfers frequently propag

Re:

[ArsonSmith]

Did you know that just by being alive, jews turn precious oxygen into carbon-dioxide?

Yea, I'm not kidding. You know that stuff that causes global warming!!

Obviously jews are the problem

If you write software...

[jessecurry]

If you write software that you want to be paid for, release it under a for pay license.
If you write software that you don't want to be paid for, release it under a completely free license... maybe even anonymously.

If all software was released this way then there wouldn't need to be any odd licensing in a software package... everything is either free or for-pay.

Re:

[antiNeo2000]

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). D

Re:

[Chandon Seldon]

You seem to think this is a simple issue. It isn't.

The question of software licensing has been complex and even controversial for decades. That apparently seems silly to you. That might even be a valid conclusion, but you're going to need a much more extensive understanding of the topic before you can convince anyone to agree.

If you're actually interested in understanding the topic so you can discuss it intelligently, I suggest actually reading / watching the following (completely):

• The Wikipedia Articl [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Ohreally_factor]

If you write software that you want to be paid for, release it under a for pay license.
If you write software that you don't want to be paid for, release it under a completely free license... maybe even anonymously.

I think you are too narrowly defining "pay" as a money only proposition. Under GPL 2, the payment for redistribution is payment in kind. That is, you use, modify, and distribute someone's GPLed code, you pay them by releasing your changes. Tit for tat, and that Finnish freak would say. It's really a nice balance, because in order to get the code you have to give up the code. Reciprocity, baby.

That's the beauty of the GPL 2. It offers the guarantee of a (non-monetary) reward to the developer, and perhaps mo

My reciprocal commitment is in the mail

[ClosedSource]

Sure. Try telling your landlord that you going to pay him in "reciprocal commitments".

Re:

[jessecurry]

That's the problem with the GNU license that will prevent it from being used in most corporate software. If I write a program that does something simple... say allows Apple Mail to access an exchange server via the OWA interface, I could proceed in two ways:
1) Spend the time to view TCP Dumps, analyze the protocol, write my own implementation, then incorporate that implementation into my plugin.
-OR-
2) I could grab one of hundreds of open source implementations of the protocol and just write the plugin
The

Re:

[fsmunoz]

Well, what you describe as a "problem" is really the intended goal... I understand your analysis but this discussion always ends up being the same. You don't see a problem with having your code used in proprietary applications, and that's great and all, but even it it surprises you other people do have a problem and use the GPL to guarantee a certain outcome. Corporations and individuals are more than free to not use the code in question if they don't think that they can follow the license or simply dislike

How about commercial?

[GrEp]

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.

Best answer? think first

[CodeShark]

I personally will almost exclusively stick to the four major OS licenses: the GPL (any version), Apache, Mozilla, and (though purists may disagree) the BSD. My experience has been that a developer generally doesn't have to blend -- most of the web-related work I do is related to Apache, therefore that fits for the C++ development. Most of the web work is in one of the GPL'd languages (Perl, Python, PHP, or Ruby), etc.

Does this fit for most others? I don't know.

Re:

[CodeShark]

No but vast amounts of the code libraries which you see out there for those languages HAVE been released under the GPL. For example

• li>in the CPAN FAQ: "Most, though not all, modules on CPAN are licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL)..."
• The PEAR repository for PHP states: herefore "with this announcement the license choices are [for future modules] reduced to the following short list: {PHP,Apache,LGPL, BSD style,MIT}but I do know that the GPL exists was used for a number of Pear modules

. BTW Ruby

I don't get it

[tie_guy_matt]

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.

Re:

[Ohreally_factor]

It is in everyone's interests to fight complexity in open source licensing and it is likely to be a constant battle - just like it is to stop a great OS forking into rival products

Why do you say that? Is there one true license to rule us all? And what's wrong with forking, exactly? One of the strengths of the GPL 2 is that it allows forks and then allows merging. You seem to be proposing some sort of unification . . . of what exactly? and under whom? Is there going to be some central committee that will determine which forks to allow and which to prohibit?

Open Sources Licenses for sale

[infonography]

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I have a limited introductory offer for any software you want at a low low rate per seat. Comes with Complemetary Viagra from te late presidents presonal stores.

Please send to my paypal account [e-mail]

Revised copyright law

[iamacat]

• Source code must be made available to any recipient of binary code upon request
• The customer must then agree to safeguard the source and be responsible for damages if leaked. The copyright owner can demand a proof that a particular customer is willing and able to honor a contract. Customers can create modified versions for private use distribute binaries and source to anyone who already obtained the corresponding original from the author.
• Copyright expires after 14 years, as envisioned by the founders, at whi

The answer is SIMPLE

[Breakfast Pants]

New projects going forward should all be released public domain. Bam. *All* projects can now use your code. Because of crazy liability statutes and crazy precedence, you will need to put a disclaim of liability/warranty on the code when *you* distribute it, but there isn't any need at all to make others who distribute it do so by adding a license term contingent on *their* distribution--that's the biggest downfall of the non-advertising clause BSD license, but in practice isn't that big of a deal. I am

Would be cool to do it automatically

[radarsat1]

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.)

Re:

[einhverfr]

Sounds doable. BUt how are you going to get a Lawyer to do something that would jeopardize his/her job security?

a lawyer's view

[faceword]

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.

Re:

[JohnFluxx]

Out of interest, did you have to review the license agreements on the normal closed source software?

Re:

[cfulmer]

Oy vey. I'm also a lawyer and get a couple of deals like this a month. There are generally a handful of well-used licenses -- the GPL, the LGPL, Apache 2.0, occasionally the Mozilla license. And then there are times when the client makes a choice -- with mySQL, for example, you choose either the GPL or the commercial license. These are generally well understood, and helping a client through that stuff is pretty easy.

The harder parts is often that the client doesn't understand exactly what they use -- th

For the overwhelming majority

[stox]

of corporate open source adopters, there is no issue, as they will not be selling and distributing the software. For those that do, open source licenses tend to cover many different products, whereas each closed product will have a different license. So, if nothing else, open source is slowly reducing the number of licenses you have to worry about.

MS XPe Licence

[russ1337]

Having just reviewed the Microsoft XPE OEM and Runtime licenses and a whole bunch of 'off-the-shelf' commercial software for some work I'm doing, navigating what you can and can't do with the software is not all that easy.... (vs what you are required to do under many FOSS licenses). Imagine the worst EULA you've ever seen, then change it randomly and apply a different restrictions to each application you're using with completely different conditions. Then put them all on one system.

The whole time I was

Let them suffer

[bug1]

"What can be done to minimize multiple-license pain for corporate open source adopters?"

Why should corporate users get an easy ride ?

Corporate users are the ones who would likely turn on us and destroy the community if it would boost the next profit report by a few percent.

Its not about users its about the source code.

But i guess if it turns out that corporate users a big on giving constructive feedback, bug reports then i guess we should give a shit, but i expect they are too busy using to do anything else

They don't have to worry about it much.....

[budword]

because UNLESS they are also DISTRIBUTING said software, they probably don't have to worry about the license very much. Especially if they stick to a GPL style license. If they are in the business of distributing software, then they damn well better have a clue on how to handle the terms of the licenses of the software they choose to use. At the end of the day, the free software world doesn't need the suits, it's the suits that need FOSS.

Ignore them

[nurb432]

If its 'open' its mine to do with as i please.

huh

[Vexorian]

1) Truly open source licenses don't govern use.
2) Most users don't distribute

Therefore there is not much of added complexity...

Not to mention the fact that there may be 1000 open source licenses, that does not mean the projects with multiple license use more than 3 and the differences on the licenses in a single project tend not to be big, and it is very unlikely you would not get into one of the 10 most common ones.

corporate OSS

[sohp]

It seems *companies* that release a version of or part of their software as open source seem to have an aversion to using existing licenses. Too many of them take a common license, and then just change the name. This is also true for open-source foundations that are arms of the various companies. Consider:

* Apache Software License
* Apache License, 2.0
* Apple Public Source License
* Computer As

Hilarious!

[IchBinEinPenguin]

Closed source compliance costs are such that the company I work for has moved to "Open (Wallet) Licensing" (http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/open / default.mspx).

We effectively buy 2 windows licenses for every box (one OEM, one volume license), we even have to pay for non-MS boxes (you license every box 'capable of running windows' regardless of whether or not it does. I run Ubuntu and I'm still paying an annual fee to MS!!).

Yeah, our problem is the proliferation of FOSS licenses (all of whi

No, just use OSI-approved licenses

[Infonaut]

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.

Re:

[Nibbler999]

There's about 60, which is still too many to try to interoperate.

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, it's not just corporate needs. Take a look at Dan Bernstein's licenses, or confusing COPYRIGHT based lack thereof. The source is open, but you can't fork it, you can't repackage it in a way he doesn't like, and you can't call it the same name if you modify it in a way he doesn't like.

Bernstein's work is often brilliant, but it's seriously hindered by his inability to play nice with existing standards. This includes his weird kind-of-sort-of-not-really software licensing.

Re:

[Brian Gordon]

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 :)

Re:

[fsmunoz]

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

Re:

[Kjella]

By forcing users of the code to obey the hacker ethic, it's breaking the hacker ethic.

It doesn't matter if there are a hundred hackers and one asshat, if that one asshat can basicly rip off your work and sell it most hackers would say "well better forced than not at all". Is it really that terrible to be forced to do the "right thing" and obey the hacker ethos, if that's what you think this is about? To me it goes sorta like having laws, yes nobody should steal and kill each other but I think we'll make a l

Re:Just use the GPL

[einhverfr]

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?

Re:

[einhverfr]

The benefit from the GNU GPLv2 is that it protects some business interests to a point if the project fails (i.e. if the project fails, your competitors can't proprietize it). This is a business and not a freedom need as BSD-style-license projects offer economic controls to ensure contrbution.

I believe that the GNU GPL v3 and the AGPL (both versions) both violate any basic ethics by placing undue restrictions on developers while failing to guarantee any more Freedom to the downstream user. The GNU GPL v3 f

Re:

[fsmunoz]

I disagree... there are reasons for using the GPL (and both our emails indicate that we agree with them) but people shouldn't feel "forced" to use the GPL just to simplify things. While I do think that there are many redundant licenses (especially those akin to the BSD, like the ISC or MIT licenses) the choice should be made due to finding the license fitting. Also reducing choices could actually mean reducing the ammount of free software, since it's obvious that many talented and generous developers prefer

Re:

[fsmunoz]

I understand that, I was just trying to kickstart the discussion. I can't believe I was modded flamebait for encouraging use of the GPL. Is this slashdot or have I slipped into a parallel universe?

Ehe, understood. Actually, /. has quite a vocal crowd which is rabidly against the GPL, the FSF, GNU, etc. This tendency as increased over the years and it's easily noticable. This is more a place for "open source" than free software in some regards...

Isolation of components in separate processes

[tepples]

What is more difficult and expensive? Reading, understanding and adhering to any of a number of open-source licenses and keeping track of what you're using and what practices you need to follow to use them for free -- or investing a lot of R&D and development and Q&A time for your own proprietary stuff?

Both. You have to isolate each component that has a different copyleft license in its own separate process, communicating with other processes through pipes or sockets. This sort of refactoring to decouple programs can be almost as labor-intensive as development from scratch, especially on an embedded system whose sliver of an operating system has little or no support for multitasking.

Re:

[ClosedSource]

"What is more difficult and expensive? Reading, understanding and adhering to any of a number of open-source licenses and keeping track of what you're using and what practices you need to follow to use them for free -- or investing a lot of R&D and development and Q&A time for your own proprietary stuff?"

It depends, but I think the proprietary option is better more often than you might imagine. It seems a lot of software patterns are used to enable globbing a lot of inappropriate software together

Re:

[Sam Nitzberg]

I agree...

But also worth mentioning is that the software is "free" with a stipulation - usually that you follow the license for distribution (or other specified) rights. That's the "cost."

For most organizations, I think that once the decision to use open-source software that meets their needs and mission is made, they can do it without too much difficulty.

If there is a direct conflict between a corporation's desire in the manner to use the open-source software and the license, then maybe that "free" softwa

Re:

[Metzli]

You mean like the horde of folks who were discussing VMware 10 days ago?

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/ 1618241 [slashdot.org]

Re:Cry me a fucking river.

[Chandon Seldon]

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.)

Re:

[einhverfr]

There are two completely separate cases:

Using Software

With Free Software, this is always allowed. No problem.

As long as you remain in good standing with the license and don't sue people under patents, the following seems to be correct.

But under the Apache License 2, you could lose patent rights required to use the software if you initiate such a lawsuit. Under the GPL v3, you could lose such patent rights for any license violation.

IANAL, but this is just my basic reading of the license.

Otherwise, I agree with your points.

Re:

[Ajehals]

IANAL either but I was under the impression (and I think I am right) that both of those issues could only arise if you are distributing the software in question.

That would be in line with the GP's statements that if you distribute you may need to get some legal advice, although realistically from what I have seen regards the GPL V2/V3 the language is clear enough that the you wont need to unless you want to push the boundaries or make use of a perceived loophole.

Re:

[einhverfr]

Not necessarily. Consider:

You use Apache internally. Apache is covered by patents from tech companies X, Y, and Z.

At some point, you discover that Apache arguably violates another of your patents. You don't like this and you ask the Apache Foundation to remove the offending code. Apache Foundation refuses.

You sue the Apache Foundation. This gets publicized, as is the fact that your public web server runs Apache.

Companies X, Y, and Z sue you for *using* Apache in violation of their patents.

IANAL, but I

Re:

[tholomyes]

I think the point is that the myriad of licensing makes open source adoption by the enterprise more difficult. This also dampens subsequent contribution-- a lot of open source contributors are programmers for corporations of one sort or another.