How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need? 276
jammag writes "Bruce Perens, who wrote the original licensing rules for Open Source software in 1997, notes that there are a sprawling 73 open source licenses currently in existence. But he identifies an essential four — well, actually just two — that developers, companies, and individuals need. In essence, he cuts through the morass and shows developers, in particular, how to protect their work. (And yes, he favors GPL3 over GPL2.) For his own coding work, he's fond of the 'sharing with rules' license, which stays true to the Open Source ethos of shared code yet also enables him to get paid by companies who use it in their commercial products."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
You want fewer licenses... (Score:3, Insightful)
You need fewer license zea^Wadvocates.
Seriously, the amount of FUD spread about by certain licenses about certain others is staggering (not naming any names), to say nothing of tautological mottoes revolving around redefinitions of words, self-serving rationalizations, and more FUD.
You're going to get this mess any time something becomes a platform for political agendas, because Bruce's single "Shared with rules" license gets forked depending on the rules. GPL3 has the obvious rules, but under that heading would be the "Kinda BSD, except can't be used by the military of any country/companies that test on animals/people who eat meat/etc..."
You only need as many as you need. (Score:2, Insightful)
Choice is good and the best licenses will grow to popularity unless tampered with by an outside force.
Hence the GPL is doing quite well. It does what most people want -- it allows for your work to stay free as it was intended.
If something better comes along, it may be used. Sort of like evolution -- survival of the best fit.
Re:As many as it takes? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are free to use your own license, containing whatever text you wish. The main limitations on you are 1) whether you can get anyone else to participate and 2) whether your license is effective in court. If your license requires me to sell my first born son into indenture, the court is not likely to uphold your license.
As you observe, standardization is desirable. One of the biggest goals of Open Source is to make more Open Source. You should be able to combine different Open Source programs into another new one, in a way the creators of the original pieces did not envision. To do this, the licenses must be compatible with each other. So, having everybody write their own is, in the long run, detrimental because all of those licenses will be incompatible with each other, or nobody will be able to understand if they are compatible or not.
So, I laid out one scenario in which lots of people and companies can use a minimal set of different Open Source licenses that fulfill the different purposes that people have for Open Source, and are compatible with each other. You are free to use that list, or ignore me.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:As many as it takes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You want fewer licenses... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I wrote the DFSG / Open Source Definition. It provides a single name for a set of licenses that grant a particular set of privileges.
I did consider licenses that prohibit military use, and decided they were a bad idea, and the DFSG / Open Source Definition does not allow them. The license that was a bad example the time was the Berkeley SPICE license. This license was written during the period of South African Apartheid, and prohibited use of the SPICE circuit simulation software by the police of South Africa. 10 years after Apartheid was over, the license restriction was still in effect. Even though the police by that time were probably Black.
The other big prohibition to consider was Commercial Use. There were a number of "personal-use only" licenses at the time. I figured that licenses that prohibited commercial use made the software pretty useless and that it would not have effective collaboration to advance its development.
Licenses are important because they use rules to structure partnerships. We need to understand them, and how to use them. Yes, there are people who are very partisan. But just calling them zealots doesn't get at the reasons for their license, and whether those reasons make sense for you.
Bruce
Re:GPL v3 vs Linus (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm impressed how Perens feels he can just brush away all disagreement with the GPL v3 because "Linus had a personal issue with it, some I'm ignoring that".
When considered against the backdrop of the entire space of Open Source (-ish) licenses, the differences between versions 2 and 3 of the GPL barely warrant a footnote. They are completely immaterial for almost all projects, and the only real question is whether or not you feel that Stallman's tweaks (which were based on lengthy consultation with the community) are worth following. Virtually everyone who's using the GPL in the first place would be sympathetic to the goals of the FSF, and therefore ought to go with the latest GPL.
As always, the real question is whether you
I prefer to think of the first option as the "communist" option and the second as the "capitalist" option. :-)
GFDL versus CC-BY-SA; noncommercial licenses (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition to software licenses, we have licenses like GFDL [gnu.org] and CC-BY-SA [creativecommons.org], which are intended for books, software manuals, etc. That whole situation is a total botch. The GFDL (without any of the added options like invariant sections, etc.) is essentially philosophically and legally equivalent to CC-BY-SA. The fact that we have two licenses for a single purpose is not a good thing. For instance, I've written some physics textbooks that are copylefted. Sometimes I've taken diagrams and photos I did for the books and added them to WP articles. Other times I've taken photos from WP and put them in my books. What makes this all unnecessarily difficult is that although WP uses GFDL (for historical reasons, because CC postdates WP), various other people use CC-BY-SA. We all want to share, but the licensing creates problems. I've ended up dual-licensing my books for this reason, and as far as I can tell, this allows me to bring in either CC-BY-SA or GFDL materials. On the other hand, if other people want to use a photo from my book, they have to look in the photo credits section at the back, and they may find that it's a photo I got from someone else under GFDL, but their project is CC-BY-SA, so they can't use it. They might be able to switch their own project to a similar dual-license scheme to get around this, but that might not be possible; e.g., look at the Linux kernel, which could never change licenses even if Linus wanted it to, because there are too many copyright holders.
One thing I would suggest to anyone uploading pictures to WP or Wikimedia Commons is that you use their recommended licensing option, which is now dual GFDL/CC-BY-SA.
Another real problem in this area is the tendency of people to pick CC-BY-NC, with a noncommercial clause. I see tons of people doing this even for materials that have zero commercial value. For example, there's an innovative physics textbook from the 1970's that went out of print. Cool book, but it was just a little too controversial; the big sellers tend to be the plain vanilla ones that can make everyone in a university department happy enough to sign off on adopting it. It's been out of print for 30 years, and the rights reverted to the author. He scanned it and put it up on his web site as a PDF. I contacted him, told him how much I liked the book, and suggested that he put it under a CC license, because, e.g., otherwise it would have to disappear from the world on the day he got tired of paying a webhosting bill. He decided to do that, which is cool, but he picked CC-BY-NC, which means the book can never be used as the basis for further collaborative work. I think people have this emotional feeling that they don't want to risk having their work exploited commercially by someone else, because that would be a ripoff. The problem is that they don't seem to do a good job of realistically assessing the chances that that would happen. Although the guy I'm referring to is a published author, there are many other people who just don't have a realistic idea of what it's like to try to make a significant amount of money by writing. There are just too many people out there who think they have the next bestseller on their hands.
Re:in the OSI, the GPL gets special treatment (Score:2, Insightful)
Please be specific. How does the GPL not satisfy the OSI standard for non-discrimination. If you're going to throw around a random inflammatory accusation as an anonymous coward you should at least back it up with facts or reasoning.
Re:A question of values (Score:3, Insightful)
I tend to stick with BSD/MIT-style licenses, but I have absolutely no problem at all with people who like and use GPL licenses. A license is a tool. I'm not going to get religious about what license a person chooses to use any more than I will if they choose to use a wrench versus a hammer when building furniture.
License consolidation may have some practical benefits, but mostly it reeks of religious zealotry trying to fit us all into one mold.
Licenses that address one attorney's fear (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a problem. It seems that every attorney has their own fear, which they insist on writing into their own license that you must use.
But IMO the largest part of the problem is that few companies are effective at managing their own attorneys. Many technical managers feel that law is a black art and that they can only manage what they understand. Top managers with this problem tend to structure the company so that middle managers can't push back on Legal, and must do whatever Legal says. And thus, company attorneys generally get their way even on small points. A general counsel who sits on the board is even able to do this to the CEO, if the other board members aren't good at managing attorneys.
If it is imposed on the attorney that using an OSI-accepted license is important, the attorney can probably do a reality-check on their own fear. The fact that this doesn't happen is more an issue of management effectiveness than anything else.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:As many as it takes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hi again (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you want me to believe you, try showing how those licenses don't satisfy a particular business purpose that would be satisfied by one of the other 70. Cite the particular text of the licenses that applies to the business purpose you're interested in.
The point here is that we need to be more analytical about this issue.
Bruce
Re:Has The GPL Ever Been Proven (Score:3, Insightful)
Bruce
Re:A question of values (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the problem is that RMS has encoded his values into his license, and one of those values is, "Proprietary software is evil."
My main problem with the proliferation of licenses is, even if using 100% open source, you're not necessarily in the clear -- BSD and GPL don't fix, for example. But, less than that, like the LGPL, is problematic because it could be linked into a proprietary program, not just free ones.
Lately, I have been leaning towards MIT-licensed stuff, mainly because the license is short, sweet, well-understood, and compatible with just about anything. I'd much rather have my work used for proprietary programs than become complete abandonware, even among open source, for licensing issues. And thanks to Steamboat Willie, a poor choice of license can't be fixed (except by explicit permission from all copyright holders, likely meaning all contributors) for over a hundred years -- so I'm actually really tempted to follow sqlite and release as public domain.
I would feel much differently if everything passed into the public domain in 15 years, and patents lasted 5 years.
Re:Hi again (Score:5, Insightful)
The hard part is giving contributors an incentive to sign over their copyright (or at least a right to relicense). It worked for MySQL because people wanted their contributions to be in the supported version of the server, which everybody else was hacking upon. It did not work for Sun, but then again Sun handles Open Source horribly. Marten Mikos just left there, following Monty out the door.
Maybe I'll write an article about dual-licensing in the future.
Thanks
Bruce
Different licenses for different business purposes (Score:4, Insightful)
The Apache-style license is a gift because a company can use the work without any quid pro quo. Obviously, much Open Source is written as part of someone's employment, whether it is BSD or GPL licensed.
Dual licensing does give some special rights to one party. In general, this one party is the main contributor, and their business purpose doesn't work without dual licensing - because they won't have a revenue stream that supports their creation of the software. A license that does not fulfill that purpose is hardly more "business friendly" than one that does.
This is not a matter of philosophy, just business sense.
Bruce
Re:You want fewer licenses... (Score:1, Insightful)
I figured that licenses that prohibited commercial use made the software pretty useless and that it would not have effective collaboration to advance its development.
And yet the GPL 3 effectively preventing commercial sale of software doesn't make it useless? Developing software costs a lot of money and support fees will never cover that cost on the majority of software applications. There's a reason that there is only one publicly traded pure play software development compnay (Red Hat) and that company makes about 15% the amount of profit per employee its proprietary competetors make.
Re:Has The GPL Ever Been Proven (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again look at the Wine project. There is a class of developers that is content with attribution at most and no other conditions and those tend use licenses of the MIT/BSD/X ilk. There are others who are more prone to feeling taken advantage of and these people tend want more rules so feel comfortable contributing only some rules are stated. The amount of this comfort needed varies hence things like the LGPL.
IMHO there is an implicit fallacy here. The fallacy is if the copyleft licenses didn't exist then all FOSS developers would be content or at least have to be content with super permissive licenses. I think it more likely such developers wouldn't make their code available at all save perhaps under the only remaining option which is PMITA Federal Prison If You Flout The EULA.
Speaking as someone who is an end user most of the time, I find the terms of most any FOSS license to be "fair enough" and find most arguing over "The True Nature Of Code Freedom" to be so much mental masturbation and flamebait.
Re:GPL v3 vs Linus (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe Linus does see the "Big Picture". He just sees it different from you.
Nah, anyone disagreeing with you must just have their head in the sand. (that was sarcasm in case you missed it)
What utter crap to think only people who agree with your licensing fetish have the public good in mind. I assure you, my preference for the BSD license is for the public good. I consider it much better for the public good than any version of the GPL. You may disagree, but don't be an ass and say I don't care about the public good.
Re:Hi again (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want your software to survive a Darwinian catastrophe, which in this case means a successful challenge in court, the most important thing is having the possibility to relicense it. FSF would have you use their "and any later version" text so that this is possible.
Other than that, the main difference between licenses is popularity. GPL currently wins the popularity contest. But it seems to me that incompatibility is too big a cost if the benefit is just the popularity contest.
Re:Hi again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hi again (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot, or at least commander taco, has generally been unwilling to do anything to help me.
If I had submitted this article to Slashdot directly, they would not have published it.
Bruce
Re:As many as it takes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good for the goose, good for the gander (Score:5, Insightful)
Both are copyrighted. One grants the right to modify, one does not.
Consider why it is not smart to modify your TCP/IP stack to be incompatible with the standard. You have the right to do so, but doing so will make it very difficult to communicate with others. And unfortunately engineers and tech companies are more likely to understand the consequences of modifying TCP than those of modifying a license. FSF doesn't prohibit you from using your own license text, they can't. They just decline to help you stick your foot in your mouth by modifying their text.
Bruce
Re:GPL v3 vs Linus (Score:1, Insightful)
A technically impossible undertaking—because there is a possibility that some of the contributors are no longer able to be contacted. And then there are the contributors that have publicly stated that they would not relicense their contributions under the GPLv3.
Taken together those two conditions mean that it is not legally possible to relicense the Linux Kernel–and this is because the text of the GPLv2 distributed with the kernel license contains a note that the 'Or, at your option, any later version' optional clause of the GPLv2 doesn't apply.
I, personally, would not license code I have written under the GPL without making such a note—if I chose a license I would not wish for it to be changed to a later version that potentially has clauses that I disagree with. But then, I'm one of those people that refuses to trust anyone—even the <sarcasm factor="100">Great and Wise Richard Stallman</sarcasm>—to consider anything beyond their own concerns when "upgrading" the license.
Note: I consider my own rights as the creator of the code more important than the rights of the user–after all, it was my creative thought and my hard work that went into writing the code. But I would be foolish to not understand the enormous benefits of Open Source (and since I am a user of a massive amount of open source software) everything that I write that I feel would be useful to other people is released under the Open Source license that I feel is most appropriate for the project.
Re:Hi again (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Has The GPL Ever Been Proven (Score:5, Insightful)
Bruce
Re:Businesses and Lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's silly, lots of companies have failed that might still be here with a viable Open Source strategy.
Attorneys are concerned with avoiding liability for their company and having enforcible licenses. If you had an employee who went around all day with his hands on his buttocks due to some irrational fear, your choice would be to terminate him or send him for psychological help. Attorneys can be more paranoid than systems programmers, and sometimes a manager must temper this.
Bruce
Re:Hi again (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hi again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He missed one: public domain (Score:2, Insightful)
The License Proliferation Straw Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Bruce's article discusses license proliferation from the perspective of how-do-I; I'd like to confront those who use it to say why-should-I.
I used to work for a company whose lawyers argued that we must avoid Free Software because there were too many licenses to understand. Really.
Okay, so hundreds or thousands of Free Software products tend to use one of a few dozen licenses. We get that.
When you use proprietary software, every software product is governed by its own unique license. This is an improvement?
License proliferation is a totally bogus reason not to use Free Software.
Epilogue: My former employer has since seen the light. The legal team (whole executive team, actually) was sacked, and the company now uses and writes software under the GPL.