Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:28:20 -0700
Inline below is the text of the OSI's License Proliferation Committee Report. This
is a DRAFT that we are submitting for community comments. This draft was handed out
at the OSI BOF at Oscon in Portland Thursday night. Did we get the licenses in the
right buckets? Please read and let us know what you think.
Laura Majerus
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DRAFT July 2006
MEMO
To: OSI Board
cc: License Proliferation Committee
Subject: Report of License Proliferation Committee and draft FAQ
The purpose of this document is to report on the efforts and recommendations of the
License Proliferation committee of the OSI ("the LP Committee").
The LP Committee is an advisory committee. Its charter states "[t]he purpose of the
Committee is to identify and lessen or remove issues caused by license proliferation."
(Charter attached).
The members of the LP Committee were:
John Cowan,
Damien Eastwood,
Bryan Geurts,
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (observer),
Laura Majerus,
Russ Nelson,
Karna Nisewaner,
Diane Peters,
Eric Raymond,
Sanjiva Weerawarana (observer),
Cliff Schmidt,
McCoy Smith
This document contains a policy statement from the LP Committee about its understanding
of the definition of license proliferation and some suggestions about what to do about
it.
This document also contains a suggestion for license groups and a FAQ to explain why
the committee made groups and how it expects it will help in lessening license proliferation.
1. What Does License Proliferation mean?
One thing that became clear as we talked among ourselves and listened to the open source
community was that different people meant different things when they used the term "license
proliferation." Comments broke down into three main groups:
a) too many different licenses makes it difficult for licensors to choose
Some people use "license proliferation" to mean that there are just too many licenses
and that someone needs to take steps to reduce the number. While this would be great,
the OSI cannot make anyone use or not use a particular license. All we can do is educate
and urge people to use a smaller subset of licenses. This comment generally came from
individuals and small companies.
b) some licenses do not play well together
Some people use "license proliferation" to refer to the fact that some open source licenses
do not inter-operate well with other open source licenses. While we can urge people
not to mix non-mixable licenses, we cannot keep people from doing so. This comment
generally came from larger companies.
c) too many licenses makes it difficult to understand what you are agreeing to in a
multi-license distribution
This is related to the previous comment, but is somewhat different since it doesn't
complain about how the licenses interact, just that there are too many different individual
licenses covering certain distributions and that it takes a lot of time to read and
understand them all. This comment usually came from larger companies.
2. What the OSI Can Do About License Proliferation
The first thing we can do is to make sure that licenses calling themselves "open source"
truly meet the Open Source Definition. In 2005, the OSI has suggested three guidelines
that they would apply to proposed licenses to determine whether they should be OSI-approved.
i) The license must not be duplicative
ii) The license must be clearly written, simple, and understandable
iii) The license must be reusable
We propose addressing the license picking issue by making available a license wizard,
as discussed below.
We propose an on-going project to group existing open source licenses. The goal of
such categorization is to help the community determine which licenses are useful in
which circumstances.
3. The Wizard Project
Volunteers from USC law school and San Francisco State engineering department are currently
working on a web-based wizard to allow people to see which open source licenses meet
criteria that they find important. These volunteers are Prof. Jennifer Urban and Prof.
Sameer Verma, along with their research assistants. For example, if a user indicates
that having a copyleft license with explicit patent grants is important, the wizard
will look through the OSI-approved licenses and output a list of licenses that meet
(or almost meet) those criteria.
The wizard assists new licensors in choosing which licenses meet their goals. The wizard
also lets licensors find licenses that almost meet their goals. We hope that being
able to generate a list of existing licenses that meet defined goals will lessen the
need for people to create their own new licenses.
4. The Groups
Originally, the LP Committee started to divide the OSI approved licenses into "recommended,"
"non-recommended" and "other" tiers. As we met and discussed, however, it became apparent
that there is no one open source license that serves everyone's needs equally well.
Some people like copyleft. Some don't. Governmental bodies have specific needs concerning
copyright rights. As we discussed which licenses should be "recommended," it became
clear that the recommended licenses were really the same as licenses that were either
widely used (for example the GPL), or that had a strong community (for example Eclipse).
Thus, we switched from the "recommended"/"non-recommended" terminology to a more descriptive
terminology of:
-Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities
-Special purpose licenses
-Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses
-Non-reusable licenses
-Other/Miscellaneous licenses
We thought that these more descriptive categories may help people initially picking
a license to use one of the more popular licenses, thereby helping to reduce the numbers
of different licenses commonly used. We realize that the majority of open source projects
currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licenses.
We also realize that the GPL is a great license choice for some people and not so great
a license choice for others. Thus, we can't just recommend that everybody use the GPL..
While such a recommendation would solve the license proliferation problem, it is not
realistic.
We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the "popular and strong communities" group
if any licenses in that group fit their needs. There are only nine licenses in this
group and if everyone considered these licenses first when choosing a license for their
project, some of the issues relating to license proliferation would diminish.
Here are the groups:
Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong
communities(9)
- Apache License, 2.0
- New BSD license
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT license
- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
- Common Development and Distribution License
- Common Public License
- Eclipse Public License
Special purpose licenses (3)
- Educational Community License (special purpose: only
suitable for educational establishments)
- NASA (special purpose: for use by an agency of the federal
government, which has special concerns regarding some issues
such as copyright protection, copyright notices, disclaimer of warranty
and indemnification, and choice of law)
- Open Group Test Suite (special purpose: only suitable for
tests or test suites)
Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses (9)
- Academic Free License (redundant with Apache 2.0)
- Attribution Assurance Licenses (redundant with BSD)
- CUA Office Public License (redundant with MPL 1.1)
- Eiffel Forum License V2.0 (redundant with BSD)
- Fair License (redundant with BSD)
- Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (redundant with BSD)
- Lucent Public License Version 1.02 (redundant with CPL)
- University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (redundant
with BSD)
- X.Net License (redundant with MIT)
Non-reusable licenses (24)
- Apple Public Source License
- Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License 1.1
- EU DataGrid Software License
- Entessa Public License
- Frameworx License
- IBM Public License
- Motosoto License
- Naumen Public License
- Nethack General Public License
- Nokia Open Source License
- OCLC Research Public License 2.0
- PHP License
- Python license (CNRI Python License)
- Python Software Foundation License
- RealNetworks Public Source License V1.0
- Reciprocal Public License
- Ricoh Source Code Public License
- Sleepycat License
- Sun Public License
- Sybase Open Watcom Public License 1.0
- Vovida Software License v. 1.0
- W3C License
- wxWindows Library License
- Zope Public License
Other/Miscellaneous licenses (5)
- Adaptive Public License
- Artistic License
- Open Software License
- Qt Public License
- zlib/libpng license
Superseded licenses (4)
- Apache Software License v1.1
- Eiffel 1.0
- Lucent 1.0
- MPL 1.0
Licenses that have been voluntarily retired (5)
- Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
- Intel Open Source License
- Jabber Open Source License
- MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License
- Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
--------------------------------
Here are our criteria for placing licenses in the various groups:
Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong
communities
We used statistics obtained from public sources to determine which licenses are widely
used. We believed that there were a few licenses that, while not the most popular,
were widely used within their communities and that these also belonged in this group.
Special purpose licenses
Certain licensors, such as schools and the US government, have specialized concerns,
such as specialized rules for government copyrights. Licenses that were identified as
meeting a special need were placed in this group.
Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses
Several licenses in this group are excellent licenses and have their own followings.
The committee struggled with this group, but ultimately decided that if we were to attack
the license proliferation problem, we had to prune licenses. Thus, licenses that were
perceived as completely or partially redundant with existing licenses were placed in
this group.
Non-reusable licenses
Licenses in this group are specific to their authors and cannot be reused by others.
Many, but not all, of these licenses fall into the category of vanity licenses.
Superseded licenses
Licenses in this category have been superseded by newer versions
Licenses that have been voluntarily retired
Self-defining category. No one should use these licenses going forward, although we
assume that licensors may or may not choose to continue to use them.
Other/Miscellaneous licenses
These licenses do not fall neatly into any category.
5. What's next?
This is a draft document. We have already advised the stewards of the licenses of the
contents of this document. We have promised to put the groups up for public comment,
possibly on the open source email list or the license proliferation discuss email list.
After that, the Board needs to decide on a process for newly approved licenses to be
placed in a group at the same time they are approved, so that grouping can be helpful
to new licensors in the future.
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