Compliance Toolkit

OSI outlines licence cull plans

Tags:
Open Source,
Licence Proliferation,
OSI

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 07 Apr 2005 09:20 BST

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has begun an effort to pare down the number of open source licences in widespread use.

The OSI, a group that bestows official open source status on licences, will promote a small number of licences as preferred options, according to a position paper it adopted on Wednesday. The group hasn't yet decided which of the more than 50 licenses it's so far approved will get the status.

OSI also adopted three new administrative provisions designed to screen out new licenses that don't add much usefulness. The provisions, proposed in March, require licenses to be clearly written, simple and understandable; reusable; and not duplicative of existing licences.

Licence proliferation has been a widely discussed issue in the software industry in recent months. HP's top Linux executive, Martin Fink, in particular has pressed for a radical reduction in the number of licences, to avoid needless confusion and expense.

Open source licences determine whether software from one project may be shared with another. That in turn affects whether there are numerous islands of incompatible source code or fewer, larger collections. License proliferation also makes more work for company lawyers evaluating open source software; a product such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes software employing several licences.

Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice-president at Computer Associates, agrees there's a licence proliferation problem, though he disagrees with Fink's approach to reducing the number. In a speech at the conference, he said CA would be willing to scrap its own open source licence if the right replacement can be found.

Sun' Community Development and Distribution License is a step in the right direction, he added. "Sun's CDDL is a great starting point in stopping proliferation," Greenblatt said.

And simply removing licences can be difficult. Intel removed its own open source licence from OSI's list, but the licence remains alive as long as the software it governs exists, Greenblatt said.

The licence changes were adopted at the first meeting of a newly expanded OSI board, held here in conjunction with the Open Source Business Conference. Five existing board members were joined on Friday by five more, most from outside the United States: Joichi Ito, vice-president of international operations at blog indexing Web site Technorati and a board member of ICANN; Bruno Souza, a senior consultant at Summa Technologies and president of Brazil's largest Java user's group; Chris DiBona, an open source program manager at Google; Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, the managing editor of the online journal First Monday and a programme manager at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands; and Sanjiva Weerawarana, a former IBM programmer and founder of the Lanka Software Foundation to promote open source software in Sri Lanka.

"OSI is institutionalising itself," making a transition to avoid pitfalls that afflict many organisations that can't survive the loss of founders' charisma or skills, group founder Eric Raymond said.