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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-12-31
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?
Member since:2005-11-13
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
Member since:2005-07-07
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!
Member since:2005-08-05
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).
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Member since:
2005-07-06
...There are far too many FOSS licences, when (IMO) there really only needs to be one open source license: the GPL.