OT: Permissive license proliferation

[Chris Travers]

On 9/8/07, Donovan Hawkins <hawkins at cephira.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2007, Chuck Swiger wrote:
>
> > However, all of these variants are simple, permissive licenses which are
> > compatible with each other and all (or pretty much all) of the
> OSI-approved
> > licenses, so this type of license proliferation doesn't seem to be doing
> any
> > real harm in the way that having less permissive licenses interact
> might.
>
> Except it requires a legal opinion to decide whether each of these custom
> licenses is compatible, to say nothing of the implicit patent grants that
> are used by most of the permissive licenses. You have to read every
> license to see what word they changed, make sure it causes no problems,
> and add up all the little unique requirements that each one added slightly
> differently:


This sort-of makes my case for allowing the approval of variations through a
separate track, does it not?

This way, the variations are all together, under one heading, and the list
of licenses doesn;t increase just because X.org decided to drop the word
"sublicense" from the MIT license...

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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