The OSI digs into license proliferation again...but why?

Someone needs to tell the Open Source Initiative, Google, and others who fret about license proliferation that the market has already cut down the number of actively used licenses to just a small handful: L/GPL, BSD/Apache, MPL, and a few others (EPL, CPL). Even so, the OSI has decided to kickstart its stalled movement to reduce the number of open-source licenses condoned by the OSI.

As OSI board member Russ Nelson writes in the board minutes:

Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers - an upper tier and a lower tier of licenses (e.g. "recommended" and "compliant"). The role of this committee would be to establish criteria for assigning the tier for each license, use a new license-proliferation mailing list for discussion and come up with a final list of two tiers of licenses....The deadline for presenting the draft recommendations from the committee back to the board will be October 2008.

It's a worthy cause, but one that has already been effectively fought and settled by the free market. I would hazard a guess that upwards of 95 percent of all open-source projects are licensed under less than 5 percent of open-source licenses. (The last time I checked, 88 percent of Sourceforge projects were L/GPL or BSD. It's been a non-issue for many years.)

There is no open-source proliferation problem. Do we have a lot of open-source licenses? Yes, just as we have a lot of proprietary licenses (in fact, we have many more of those). But we don't have a license proliferation problem, because very few open-source licenses actually get used on a regular basis.

This is a phantom. It seems scary, but it's not real.

Disclosure: I used to serve on OSI's board.

[jrepenning]

I don't think it's quite so pointless as all that. Documenting the market-chosen short list still a service.

I'm an administrator in an open source hosting facility, tigris dot org. When people propose projects, we sometimes (maybe 25% of the time) have to encourage them to think about licensing. It's useful to have some documentation of the "short list" to point the proposers to.

[TimBowden]

I'll back jrepenning on this one. For OSI to highlight the preferred licenses of the OSI would help newbies to licensing cut through the issue. Those who have been here a while might know what licenses are what but there's more out there who will still need to get up to speed than are already in the know. That's where the value of this proposal comes in.

[John W. Cowan]

I agree with both sides. I'm on that committee, and I'm proposing that the recomended licenses *for new projects* be limited to the GPLv3 for people who want strong copyleft, the LGPLv3 for people who want weak copyleft, the 3-clause BSD license for people who want a simple permissive license but need interoperability with the GPLv2, and the Apache 2.0 license for everybody else who wants a simple permissive license.

My wizard at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/floss implements this decision path.