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...you could not be more correct.

Upon review, my comment (above) is rather flippant and rude. Sorry (can't edit).

What the world needs now is not "More Love, Sweet Love". (Actually, it is, but that's too much to expect in this day and age, isn't it?)

But when someone comes back and says "Hey, what I said before might have been out of line." Well, that's notable. We don't see nearly enough of that on this semi-anonymous internet.

I call that refreshing. :0>

I'm more a fan of a GPL fan but even I can't agree with you,
opensource is a lot more then GPL only.

LGPL and X11 and other licenses are very needed as well.

If I'm writing a library I'm never going to choose GPL but rather lgpl or bsd.
And if I want technology to be wide spread and adopted in every product then I would use MIT license(or X11 or...) but not GPL.

Get my point?

I think what we need is a website that helps you choose which license you want to use in a wizard-like format, sort of how people have set up similar tools to help people select a Linux distro.

For example:
Do you want to make it manditory for people to distribute the source code with the binary:

- Yes
- No

I think what we need is a website that helps you choose which license you want to use in a wizard-like format, sort of how people have set up similar tools to help people select a Linux distro.

Here ya go (just chooses between the different creative commons licenses though) :

http://creativecommons.org/license/

What I REALLY like about creative commons licenses is the pictograms they use to explain in laymans terms what rights are reserved or are given by the author. Makes everything nice and clear for everyone, not just lawyers.

Edit: Ahah, I think you might find this one to your liking : http://www.openfoundry.org/index.pl?section=en_license

Edited 2006-03-30 18:25

I speculate that
(1) such an application would have to be run by an accredited lawfirm,
(2) (1) prevented something like this from being set up until today.

That's so short sighted i don't know where to begin!

Some people want their source to be SO free that they don't even care if companies use it (BSD). Others want companies to be able to use it, but not without giving back! (LGPL) some want it to be free, no matter what, at all costs (GPL). Simply put there is just more than one philosophy in this world and you CANNOT say one is "the right one" for everybody!

At the very least the LGPL is needed too. You couldn't make Linux work without it (since you wouldn't be able to link anything closed source with glibc libraries and therefor they wouldn't be able to run at all).

If there is to be one licence it needs to be one that allows open source to co-operate with closed source. The GPL is very restrictive. For example, you can add perl to a GPL project without messing up any licences but you can't add GPLd code to perl without the combination being under a more restrictive licence than perl's original (Perl is artistic or GPL. The combination would be GPL only)

This lack of ability to combine code from multiple open source projects is a serious long term problem and limits the usefulness of GPL'd code. This is by design though as the GPL is designed to not let people use GPL'd code in non-GPL'd programs. Basically, any code that could be generally useful if incorperated into other programs should probably be LGPL or lower (BSD/Artistic).

Real Open Source is when you have acess to the source code at all time be it original , derivative , fork , etc ...

- Remove the license that allow closing of the source code at anytime.
- Remove the license that allow people to make closed source derivative from orriginal.

Ironically by following your approach, you'd be removing the freedom of the developer(s). "Free" should mean just that, take some code and do with it what you will.

I don't think that copyleft licenses are always the best solution. For things you want widely spread like media codecs it's better to choose a non-copyleft license so that proprietary software adapt it too.

Ironically by following your approach, you'd be removing the freedom of the developer(s). "Free" should mean just that, take some code and do with it what you will.

But here i disagree and just want to ask the question: "Is this still freedom or already power?" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html

Edited 2006-03-30 16:48

Freedom always has 2 sides to it. In fact, there is no such thing as unrestricted freedom. Your freedom to act ends where my nose begins. A developer's freedom ends where he begins to claim ownership of other people's code. A developer's rights end when he starts trying to restrict what his users can do.

It would be great if we could all just do what we wanted, but we all share the same namespace, as it were.

It's no accident that the BSD license dates from the time it did. It bears a naivet'e that could only have come from the 60's. (No, it didn't come until a bit later, after the flower children grew up some more, but before they hit 30.)

One needs look no further than Theo de Raat's recent complaints to see that Free licenses today need some teeth to avoid the problem that OpenSSH seems to have today.

Personally, I think that the GPL already has quite enough teeth, though. If GPL adds many more in GPLv3 they won't reasonably fit into one mouth.

The real problem would seem to be the amount of space between the BSD, which is too weak, and the GPL, which is at about the limit of acceptability wrt restrictions.

That said, I'd feel better if I didn't think Mr. Fink's statement wasn't just a continuation of the whole Sun/IBM/HP bicker-fest.

The BSD licence is not naive, it is fundamentally free. "Here, take this and do whatever you want, bye". It is perhaps naive to think that this approach will make a lot of money, but that is not the fault of the licence...

But I don't think it should really be a problem.

Most other licences are minor variations from those 4 or 5 you mention.

"Let's not degrade this into another silly GPL vs. BSD license "


Oh come on...what did you expect posting this Thom, the whole article is flamebait

>Does anyone know of a example of dual licensing?
GPL/Non FOSS?

The most known are probably MySQL and Qt

Thanks but I already know about these. I was more after an example so I could see how the commercial license ties in with the GPL one. I found one now. Thanks again.

OSI is trying to do something about it though:

http://www.opensource.org/docs/policy/licenseproliferation.php

True, but nobody claims that profileration of commercial licencess isn't a also a problem
Open source was (among others) meant to solve it so you don't need not to bother with consulting lawyers and stuff.

Besides statistics you brought refer to the number of freshmeat projects regardless of their significance. If you only take successfull and important projects into account the situation is a bit different (i.e. many big collaborative projects choose their own licences).

>What is the big deal. I mean look, every single peice of commercial software has it's own license they dont share licenses usually!

First let me say, that every Free Software is and can be commercial too. Probably you mean non-free or proprietary software.

But i think comparing the situation of Free Software licenses with non-free software licenses is useless. Because a bad situation on the proprietary side doesn't makes the situation on the Free Software side better.

You asked "What is the big deal.". The problem appear if you want to mix some Free Software. The more incompatible licenses are available the higher is the risk that you can't build new software upon more than one existing software but i would consider this as one of the most important things in Free Software, enabling cooperation. Cooperation is more important than copyright and with the extend of Free Software licenses the risk increases copyright can get in the way of cooperation.

Edited 2006-03-30 22:05

"HP hasn't released anything major under any opensource license"

Agreed...

I do wish that OpenMail (now Scalix) was opened up...that has to be one of the biggest missed opportunities I can think of (personal opinion of course), Though to be fair can someone who nows post here some of their contributions?

It is true that there are many commercial licenses. This just means that license proliferation does not make FLOSS any more or less suitable to be deployed in a given situation. It's not a problem in that sense, agreed.

This does not mean it's not a serious problem within the FLOSS world. It's not a disadvantage compared to the proprietary world, but it certainly is a disadvantage compared to the ideal world we'd like to be in. And participating in FLOSS is all about getting closer to that world.

Luckily, as many have pointed out, most FLOSS is released under a limited set of licenses. We should be careful though.

Edited 2006-03-31 08:42

"This does not mean it's not a serious problem within the FLOSS world."

Agreed, it's not a situation without it's problems but it's pretty rich when a company that actively contributes to the commercial license madness complains about FLOSS licensing.