License Reviews

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   From: "Lawrence E. Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com>
   Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 11:47:04 -0800

   I hope the open source community can help
   encourage creative thinking in licensing, just as it encourages creative
   thinking in software development, without settling too early on a
   "standard."

I think it really depends upon what the goals of the licensor are.

If the goal is to experiment with licensing strategy, or to put code
out there to claim for PR purposes, that's fine.

If the goal is to get people to contribute to the project, then the
licensor should pick a well known license.  A weirdo license is a big
barrier.

I believe OSI could help by providing information explaining license
tradeoffs to people considering releasing open source code.  I
couldn't find anything on that topic in a quick search of the
opensource.org web site.

(Actually, I don't think the opensource.org web site is very well
organized.  There is too much text, and no table of contents.  There
is no obvious way to search it.  Also, there isn't much you can do
about this, but I often forget and go to www.osi.org first, which I
always find amusing.)

Ian