Martin Fink, Hewlett Packard’s Linux vice-president, yesterday slammed the open source community’s complex licensing schemes, suggesting that there are too many open source licences for developers to manage properly. Closing a presentation at the Linux World Conference and Expo in Sydney yesterday, Fink said, “If there’s one thing that you take home from my speech today it is: do not make more open source licences.”
…There are far too many FOSS licences, when (IMO) there really only needs to be one open source license: the GPL.
…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).
One simple way would be to get ride of all the half-time traitor license.
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.
Open Source should be about one thing and one thing only having the source code availaible , nothing else.
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…
First , its Open Source where discussing , not free software the two are very different.
Second , Freedom is not about closing thing or slavery by single ownership. Freedom is everyone as the same rights and they are protected by everyone.
Third , Open Source is not about having the possibility to close it , or do anything you whant with it , its about having access to the source code at all time , thats Open Source.
fourth , the developper ( I call them thieve , traitor and liar to the Open Source cause ) who sugest that closing access to source code is good are doing so in order to give themself an advantage over others and are not real Open Source developper and are destroying Open Source by there actions.
In real Open Source you can build on the shoulders of giants and others can build upon yours.
I can agree with Martin Fink, probably there are to many Free Software licenses.
I think their are 4-5 naturally grown licenses: GPL, LGPL, BSD license, Apache License and XFree/MIT License. This licenses covers all common ways of licensing Free Software.
But the problem is, that you can’t forbid people to write new licenses. So i can’t see a solution for this problem. And Martin Fink as a ambassador of a big company (HP) shouldn’t forget that many of this additional Free Software licenses come from companies like IBM, Sun, Trolltech Mozilla/Netscape,…
Most community projects are happy with the 4-5 core licenses i had mentioned.
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 war. They both have their merits in one situation or another. I will remove this thread if this degrades into GPL vs. BSD War #485889649909.
You’ve been warned.
They both have their merits in one situation or another.
What would be an example?
I will remove this thread if this degrades into GPL vs. BSD War #485889649909.
What effect would that have?
“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
He rails out against the “Open Source” licenses. Perhaps there are a lot of them. Only a few are popularly used, and one of these must surely fill a particular need.
However, there are a large number of ‘proprietary’ licenses, as each separate piece of software one buys seems to have its own license written just for that piece of code. Many businesses will likely settle on just one or two, maybe. But each business will also have their own license, and not use the license of another business.
So, yeah. There are a lot of licenses all over, and this is not really just an “open source” problem.
Does anyone know of a example of dual licensing?
GPL/Non FOSS?
>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.
Before 1998, there were only a small number of free software / open source licenses around. However, once Netscape was convinced to free Mozilla, every corporation that put out open source had their own lawyers draft up their own unique, incompatible license. The OSI blessed them all. Then their lawyer, Larry Rosen, put out even more licenses on his own, incompatible with everything else in the world, just because he didn’t like Stallman’s rhetoric (so he made a GPL-like license that was incompatible with the GPL).
We’d be better off if people picked either the GPL if they want copyleft, the LGPL if they want partial copyleft for a library, or the MIT/X license if they want to allow unlimited use. Those three should be good enough for most purposes. For fine-tuning, pick the GPL, and add “special exception” terms.
OSI is trying to do something about it though:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/policy/licenseproliferation.php
While I appreciate that someone in industry actually has an opinion on the matter, it’s a very illogical position.
Yes, there are 59 open source licenses recognized by OSI, only half of which cover more than one product. Of the 43,000 F/OSS projects registered on Freshmeat (excluding the 4.8% of projects simply labeled “freeware” without clarification), 70% use the GPL, 6.1% use LGPL, 5.8% use BSD, 1.8% use the Perl artistic license, … er, more than 80% of F/OSS software uses one of 4 different licenses.
How about commercial software licensing? It seems to me that each package comes with its own EULA, which is ammended by additional licenses terms negotiated at the time of purchase, possibly subject to change by the vendor.
I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say that there are too many F/OSS licenses. In practice, few are used and even then it is clearly a superior situation to the alternative.
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).
like 90% of open source software used is under the GPL license, and a high percentage under the BSD license which is compatible with it.
the rest is under similiar licenses.
What is the big deal. I mean look, every single peice of commercial software has it’s own license they dont share licenses usually!
They just want to bitch and complain and steal
>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
It’s nice that HP wants to start a whine fest on which OpenSource licenses need to die, but I don’t think its earned the right to make any such judgement. HP hasn’t released anything major under any opensource license. HP-UX, openview, most of there printer drivers, all of there printer firmware and controllers are all closed source. When they start putting code where their mouth is they can comment on what others are doing.
“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?
For about a year, I am using WTFPL for all codes I release to the public. Perhaps you should consider it too.
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
…there arent 5 billion different commercial licensing schemes that are all complex and convoluted. Oh wait…
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.
Read the same “news” in August last year at a German site http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung…
Well I would advise Martin Fink to encourage corporations like HP, Sun and others to stop bloody well making new open source licenses just so that they can keep control over a project or the code.
“HP” does not care in the slightest about what I want either. In fact, “HP” until today “recommends” (aka “promotes”) “Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional”[1]. I wonder what position these claimants think they are in that they now start issuing legally structural demands to the open source community. I find this disproportionate.
[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/store_access.do