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.
First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn't want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don't have widespread use and acceptance.
This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public License.
Google's Chris DiBona played the proliferation card again against the MPL, but also admitted that how Google determines whether a license is suitably popular is "so arbitrary." Great. That makes me feel better. At least there's a clear criterion for deciding. Not.
While some projects have moved away from the MPL in recent years, it remains one open source's standard licenses. I've got to think this has more to do with MPL derivatives (It's no secret that DiBona disliked the "badgeware" licenses that derived from the MPL) and their potential impact on Google's ability to consume their code, just as with the Affero GPL, than with any respect for license proliferation.
If it were about proliferation, Google would settle on GPL/LGPL, BSD/Apache, and MPL. Between those, most licensing preferences would be covered. By leaving out the MPL, however, Google has mistakenly dumped the baby with the bath water.
Canard: a deliberately misleading fabrication.
That's the word I thought of when I read this article on how open-source license proliferation threatens adoption of open source in the enterprise. I stopped thinking of license proliferation as a serious threat to open source back in 2004 when the Open Source Initiative last beat this drum. Since then it has been very clear that license proliferation is a minor threat at best.
The analyst Saugatuck disagrees:
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