Lawrence Rosen wrote at 16:47 (EDT) on Tuesday: > Perhaps, but the license proliferation issue is not quite helpful when > phrased that way. It isn't that MORE licenses are necessarily > bad. Instead, say that the proliferation of BAD (or "me-too" or > "un-templated" or "legally questionable") licenses is bad.
The main "community" problem with proliferation is license incompatibility. Mozilla Foundation and the FSF did some great work together to reconcile the compatibility issues of the two most popular copylefts. We need to ensure that future license fit in the main compatibility, which I view as (from weakest copyleft to strongest): ISC => 2-clause-BSD => permissive-MIT License => Apache License => MPL => LGPL => GPL => Affero GPL If new licenses can't drop in somewhere along that spectrum, it's a proliferation problem, IMO. I suspect, however, that for-profit corporate folks would disagree with this as the primary problem here. I know that company's legal department really want to keep the license texts they must review quite low, and ISTR that was the biggest complaint about license proliferation from for-profit entities. It's hard to blame newcomers for wanting to draft their own licenses, as I think it's highly difficult to become part of the Free Software license policy discussion about existing licenses in practice *even* for would-be insiders. -- -- bkuhn _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss