What's this commercial license, and what's the problem with CDDL?

[Chuck Swiger]

David Ryan wrote:
[ ... ]
> I agree completely that the OSI has created a problem for itself with 
> license proliferation, however, I don't see this being solved by saying 
> that they will only be three licenses (as suggested by the article).

It may be fair to say that the OSI has been approving licenses too easily, but 
the authors of the licenses being proposed are responsible for proposing them.

:-)

I don't think the world gets better when programmers try to write software 
licenses-- we should try to be creative in our code, not in our legal 
agreements-- but it is understandable that sometime people will have specific 
terms in mind which are unique to their situation and goals, which means they 
will end up creating new licenses.

As John just said, BSD/MIT-like licenses can be mixed together with other 
licenses without much problem.  For more restrictive licenses, software 
packaging mechanisms used on Linux and the BSDs like pkgsrc, Fink, 
apt/dselect, ports all manage to deal with the special license cases without 
too much problem.

> I'm also interested in the so called controversy over the CDDL.  Having 
> read over the differences again, it seems to only clarify the MPL.  Is 
> there any *real* issues with the CDDL that people have found?  The 
> original story is at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40672.html

I think it was a slow news day, myself.  The CDDL is a fine license.
(Credit-where-credit-is-due: the MPL is a fine license too.  :-)

-- 
-Chuck