The committee was set up in 2005 with the aim of reducing the number of open source licenses by separating them into three groups: recommended, not recommended and ‘other’. It was hoped that vendors would avoid using those licenses in the not recommended category.
The first draft of the committee’s report is now available and indicates that the plan proved too simplistic given the variety of potential uses for open source licenses. It became apparent that there is no one open source license that serves everyone’s needs equally well, stated the report.
Instead of officially recommending specific licenses, the committee has instead separated the licenses into more descriptive categories: licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities, special purpose licenses, licenses that are redundant, non-reusable licenses, and other/miscellaneous.
The OSI’s license proliferation committee said it still hoped the categorization would help to reduce the number of open source licenses by pointing to the strengths of the nine most popular licenses with the strongest communities
We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the ‘popular and strong communities’ group, the report added. 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.
The nine licenses are: the Apache License 2, the new BSD License, the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL, the MIT License, the Mozilla Public License, Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License, the Common Public License, and the Eclipse Public License.
The special purpose license includes the NASA license for federal government uses, the Educational Community License, and the Open Group Test Suite, which is for test suites only, while the list also names nine redundant licenses that have been superseded by newer licenses.
There are also 24 licenses listed that are non-reusable as they relate to specific products, vendors or projects, while five licenses are listed that have already been retired, such as the Intel Open Source License.
Following the publication of the first draft, the list of groups will be made available for public comment, while the OSI is planning to create a process for new licenses to be automatically placed in a group.
The committee also stated that grouping licenses should also help the community determine which licenses are useful in which circumstances. The report also revealed that a project is underway involving volunteers from the University of Southern California’s law school and the San Francisco state engineering department to create a web-based wizard that will enable users to see which open source license best fits their needs.
