OSI seeks open source licence reform

The Open Source Initiative wants to reduce the number of open source licences

The Proliferation Committee of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has published the first draft of a report that seeks to curb the proliferation of open source licences. 

The Committee recommends the creation of three licence categories to help developers choose one of the more popular licences, thereby reducing the number of licences commonly used.

The proposal ignores calls from the open source community to standardise on the General Public Licence (GPL).

"We realise that the majority of open source projects currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licences," the draft states.

"We also realise that the GPL is a great choice for some people and not so great a choice for others. Thus, we cannot just recommend that everybody use the GPL.

"While such a recommendation would solve the licence proliferation problem, it is not realistic."

The OSI cannot revoke licences and has to rely on a licence's steward to do so. This is considered an arduous task because it generally requires the authorisation of all developers who have contributed to projects governed by the licence.

The Committee now proposes to create categories of licences. The first group contains licences that are popular and widely used or with strong communities.

The second group holds special purpose licences, while the third comprises redundant or non-reuseable licences plus those that cannot be categorised.

The proposition essentially creates a group of 'OSI-preferred' licences, and those that the OSI believes should be abandoned.

The first group includes the Apache licence, GPL, the Mozilla Public Licence and the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL) created by Sun Microsystems for its OpenSolaris project.

The three special purpose licences provide terms that apply only to educational institutions, government entities or testing deployments.