An explanation of the difficulty of solving licenseproliferation in one sentence
Jeremy McLeod
jeremy at chroot.net
Wed Mar 9 18:53:15 UTC 2005
On Wed Mar 09, 2005 at 12:42:30PM -0600, Fink, Martin R wrote:
> From Glen's message....
> > W.r.t. license proliferation, I found Marten Mickos' keynote comment
> at
> > LinuxWorld interesting (paraphrased): "1000 commercial packages have
> 1000
> > licenses, 1000 open source packages have 50 licenses. This is success,
> not
> > failure, and doesn't need to be fixed."
>
> If Marten did in fact say this, then the statement needs clarifying:
> "1000 commercial packages have 1000 (BINARY) licenses, 1000 open source
> packages have 58 (SOURCE) licenses." The difference is dramatic and
> significant. Open source is about sharing at the source level....
The point being that it doesn't cost corporations any more, and often
less, to evaluate a variety of open source license than it does to
evaluate the licenses for all the proprietary software they use. So
what's the problem?
I mean, everyone has to hire a team of lawyers to tell them what they
can or can't do with a particular piece of software or source code,
right? Nobody can just tell by reading the license themselves what they
are and aren't allowed to do, right? Right?
Ok, then.
--
Jeremy McLeod
jeremy at chroot.net
"The secret to programming is having smart friends."
-Ron Avitzur
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list