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The whole OSS licensing field is a true minefield. IMHO, the Creative Commons folks (CC) have done a much better job at creating a series of clearly defined lic
by ternaryoperator 6y ago
The whole OSS licensing field is a true minefield. IMHO, the Creative Commons folks (CC) have done a much better job at creating a series of clearly defined licenses. With CC, you can quickly determine the freedoms and responsibilities conferred by each license.
Meanwhile, in OSS, you have to research the fine distinctions between BSD-2 clause, BSD 3-clause, MIT, etc. Or Apache vs. Eclipse, etc. Even fundamental distinctions such as between OSS and Free Software (GNU-style) are regularly misunderstood, as in this article.
I'd like to see the OSI convene the organizations that have issued the various licenses and get them to agree on a new OSS licensing scheme modeled after the system used by the Creative Commons.
I think everyone would benefit from that level of clarity.
- type0 6y ago> I'd like to see the OSI convene the organizations that have issued the various licenses and get them to agree on a new OSS licensing scheme modeled after the system used by the Creative Commons. this is standards proliferate https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- ternaryoperator 6y agoNo, licenses are not standards that require code changes to be adopted. The OSS community has a long history of moving off old licenses to new versions and the OSI lists many retired licenses due to this. (When Apache replaced their 1.1 license with the current 2.0 license, there was no complaint about proliferation. Rather, the community adopted the new license and today 1.1 is entirely dead.)
- type0 6y agoLicense versions are a different thing. Changing to a completely different one in practice is a huge undertaking since every past contributor needs to agree to it