4 ms·

I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to write their own license.

• yellowapple 9y ago
  I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to use a single one-size-fits-all license in complete ignorance of their actual needs and goals.
  • maxlybbert 9y ago
    They grew out of that before they realized there's little value in writing a new license when there are already so many to chose from. I was just starting out when Google Code announced it would only host projects that used an approved license, and Google had a very short list of approved licenses. Sourceforge was more flexible than that, but they still discouraged people from striking out on their own. It took me a while, but I was eventually grateful to Google for being so effective at hitting the brakes. Opensource.org currently lists 83 approved licenses. Fsf.org has a similar list. For a new license to be valuable to me it has to be measurably better than each of those 83 licenses in some way that matters to me. Otherwise it's an annoyance, at best.
  • yarrel 9y ago
    Their needs and goals are open source (sic) software. Unsolving this problem would be self-defeating.