BSD-like licenses and the OSI approval process

[Alexander Terekhov]

On 10/17/07, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> Donovan Hawkins asked:
> > Why would he want to switch to an unpopular
> > license that the OSI lists as redundant?
>
> OSL is the 11th most commonly used open source license in open source
> projects in the world. AFL is the 12th. (The Non-Profit OSL is too new to
> show up in the list of the most commonly used 20 licenses.) I'm proud of
> those statistics.
>
> OSI lists AFL as redundant on their website because the self-appointed
> committee that established categories didn't fully understand the legal
> implications of the licenses they were evaluating, and they also didn't
> understand how to solve the license proliferation problem they were
> chartered to address. For example, they included the CDDL among "popular"
> licenses because one of its authors was on the OSI committee, but CDDL
> doesn't even show up on the list of the 20 most commonly used licenses. OSI
> listed the Eclipse license as "popular", but it is number 14 on the list of
> 20 most commonly used licenses, below both AFL and OSL.
>
> Michael Tiemann and Russ Nelson both promised me privately that the OSI
> board will address this categorization problem, but as with so many other
> issues, they haven't yet.
>
> /Larry
>
> P.S. I will provide a link to the data upon which this email is based after
> I receive permission. The report is not yet published.

http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss

Top 20 Most Commonly Used Licenses in Open Source Projects
The table below illustrates the top 20 licenses that are used in open
source projects, according to the Black Duck Software KnowledgeBase.
This data is updated daily.

Please click on a license name for more information.

Rank License %
1. GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 59.72%
2. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 11.40%
3. Artistic License (Perl) 8.06%
4. BSD License 2.0 6.50%
5. Apache License 2.0 2.72%
6. MIT License 2.44%
7. Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1 1.30%
8. Common Public License (CPL) 0.86%
9. GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0 0.69%
10. zlib/libpng License 0.64%
11. Open Software License (OSL) 0.50%
12. Academic Free License 0.42%
13. PHP License Version 3.0 0.37%
14. Eclipse Public License (EPL) 0.36%
15. Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.0 0.32%
16. Ruby License 0.30%
17. Sun Berkeley License (BSD 2 +) 0.26%
18. Qt Public License (QPL) 0.20%
19. Python Software Foundation License 0.18%
20. Apache License 1.1 0.17%
26. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0 0.10%

"Lies, damn lies and statistics. " :-)

regards,
alexander.

--
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     -- Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman: 'Live Cheaply'