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OSI Urged To Reform Open-Source Licensing

That’s the running debate reported at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40672.html

OSI being the Open Source Initiative which is the organisation that tests prospective licenses with the fundamentals of the Open Source definition and approves. Of course people are free to license how they see fit, but this is a nice benchmark.

The problem of course is that there are now already 58 licenses that are OSI approved. It’s all open source, but many are incompatible with eachother. This creates a quagmire when you’re putting together a product made up of open source components with different licenses.

I think the article is an interesting read. The idea is to reduce down to 3 licenses:

I would, personally, be quite pleased with a reduction in the number of licenses. It makes life much easier, without actually limiting anything. If you look at the licenses listed at OSI, most of them are very similar with trivial differences. They just need to be made generic with “fill in the blanks here” like GPL does.

People sometimes ask me why MySQL doesn’t make its own license to best fit its needs. This is the reason! MySQL actually did have its own license before 2000, and at that point the (IMHO wise) decision was made to go GPL. Yes, it does mean we always have to think hard about our business model as noone else has gone before us, but that’s a worthwhile challenge.

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