Open Source Licences all the way

The Open Source Business Conference today showed in a big way how quickly the open source industry can respond to challenges. At LinuxWorld in February, open source licences suddenly became an issue after HP's Linux boss Martin Fink said there were too many of them (there are 58 different ones).

Today, CA's Linux guy Sam Greenblatt revealed that he has been talking to Sun Microsystems and IBM to create a common commercial licence that companies across the industry can use as a template on top of which they stack their own requirements. If it's up to Greenblatt, Sun's CDDL has a good shot at forming the initial framework for this template.

And speaking of templates, the Open Source Initiative in the future will start requiring anyone that seeks certification to start using templates. The OSI is the organisation that gives licences the official status of being open source. After all, at the end of the day most licences look very much alike. If people just start using templates with – again – some customizations stacked on top of it, at least it all becomes a lot easier to oversee. It might not solve the issue of licence proliferation, but at least its becoming a lot easier to oversee.

Sam Greenblatt

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