Open-source board eyes fewer licenses

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is used for all products that come out of the open-source Apache Software Foundation, such as the Apache Web server.

The number of open-source licenses has been climbing steadily. Right now, there are more than 50 OSI-approved licenses, some of which are specific to different organizations or companies.

Sun Microsystems, for example, recently introduced the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) for its open-source version of Solaris.

Greenblatt, and other industry executives, believe the number of licenses can be dramatically distilled down.

"Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL and, of course, there will be the BSD because you can't rid of it," he said. The Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, is a popular variant of Unix developed by the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s.

Greenblatt added that elements of other licenses, such as Sun's CDDL, could be used to form the short list of open-source licenses.

Computer Associates itself devised a separate license, called the CA Trusted Open Source License, when it created an open-source project around its Ingres r3 database. But it now regrets that decision, said Tony Gaughan, the company's senior vice president of development. "If we had taken more counsel, we might have done things differently," he said.

OSI's critical role
Working with Greenblatt on the effort to winnow the number of open-source licenses is Martin Fink, vice president of Linux at Hewlett-Packard and an OSDL board member, and Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation that oversees the GPL.

At a keynote presentation at LinuxWorld on Tuesday, Fink, who is chair of the OSDL's intellectual property subcommittee, criticized the role the OSI has had in certifying licenses. He said he has asked OSDL Chief Executive Officer Stuart Cohen to work with the OSI to address the problem.

"Clearly, the OSI has not internalized its critical role to ensure that the licensing underpinnings upon which open source is built remain a force to be reckoned with," Fink said.

"This current path of approving licenses--based simply on the compliance to a specification rather than on the basis of a new license's ability to further innovate the business model of the open source industry--represents to me a clear and present danger to the very core of what makes open source work," Fink said. "If this is the path the OSI continues to choose, then it is choosing a path towards irrelevance."

For his part, OSI's Nelson said that he is still studying the issue. The OSI could set tougher standards for approving open-source licenses to discourage groups from creating their own. Also, cutting down on the number of licenses may not necessarily address the issue of code-sharing if organizations continue to choose incompatible licenses among a shorter list.

"If we said to Sun, 'No way, no how, are you going to get your license approved,' they probably would have gone with the MPL," Nelson said, referring to the Mozilla Public License, which governs the open-source Mozilla Web browser and related software. Sun's CDDL is a slight modification of MPL.

One idea that Nelson has considered is to have a tiered system of open-source license certifications. A "gold" license would apply to the top four or five licenses that are used in the great majority of open-source projects, he said, and a "silver" license would those that are used by fewer projects, such as the Apache Software License.

CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

[Jeff Putz]

I've heard this before...

We've heard this before. Yeah, from Redmond. So now the comments that Ballmer and Gates make about open source aren't so ridiculous?

That's why treating open source as religion isn't good for anybody.

Why would MS care

If certain OS licenses conflicted with others? They would like that situation as one of the few true arguments they have against it. There is more wrong with MS licenses then all the oS ones combined.

Streamlining them all is a very good idea, after all the point of OS would be negated if one could not share with everyone else.

[Gleeplewinky]

Interesting issue, not just for open source...

While OSI might be worried about it, the issue is
equally if not more pertinent in the closed
source domain (where the issue is largely
ignored). For example, those familiar with their
Windows EULAs would recognize that the use of
Citrix and WebEx are prohibitted, yet they are
the predominant platform with which these
applications are used.

Many commercial software licenses prohibit the
development of compatible products or integration
with other software. Some licenses prohibit
addressing bugs or flaws in the software without
service by the company, et cetera.

On a typical corporate PC, you can sit down with
all the EULAs for all software loaded on it and
count dozens of incompatible clauses between the
packages. That said, there appears to be a
"gentlemen's agreement" in the industry to look
the other way, but it's a cesspool of potential
liability waiting to be ignited by a sinking ship
seeking revenue.

I think that in this regard, the OSI licenses
tend to be somewhat less severe. Perusing the
list on their website, it doesn't seem to get
sticking until you start to retask code from a
body of code under one license to be used with
code under another license. All of the OSI
licenses are without liability to an end-user or
deployer of software licensed under an OSI
approved license.

Even with a proliferation, OSI-approved licenses
are more boilerplate than the customized one-offs
you get with other software. I think that the
value of this won't really be appreciated until
the software industry starts suing it's consumers
ridiculously like the entertainment industry is
starting to theirs.

[sndrsndvz]

hi guys am new here , forums looking code, hope to find out some good info