Door 1, 2, or 3
Three open source licenses is more than enough.
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
Another day, another open source license. Or at least that’s how it seems.
There’s the venerable
GPL and the less restrictive
LGPL; the
MIT, BSD, Mozilla, and
Apache licenses; the variants that vendors such as Trolltech (the
QPL), Sleepycat (the
SL) and Sun (the
CDDL, SISSL, SPL) use; and as if that list wasn’t enough, there’s roughly
fifty more open source licenses on the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) list of OSI “approved” licenses (see
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/). It’s like alphabet soup, and the sheer number of licenses makes counseling (the leather sofa kind) and counsel (the leather wingtip kind) seem like bargains.
Of course, this rather long list of licenses (and I’m sure my list is far from complete) didn’t spring into existence overnight. Much like source code, open source licenses — and the underlying philosophies and legal theories behind them — evolve. Over time, licenses face legal challenges and are revised to clarify and refine the intent of the licensor, and it’s unrealistic to expect one license to fit all: Sun’s interests are not IBM’s interests are not Richard Stallman’s interests. And developers, take comfort: lawyers succumb to Not Invented Here disease, too.
It’s easy to have perfect hindsight: perhaps a different precedent should have been set way back when. A statement on the OSI web site (which I’ll paraphrase for brevity) concurs:
