[License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on "why standard licenses"?

Mon Apr 28 23:06:41 UTC 2014

Hi Philip,

Thanks for the Black Duck "Top 20" list of open source licenses. Your list
is the best around, so please don't take the following criticism too
personally. But this list demonstrates that even the ways that we calculate
popularity are flawed. For example:

*         Are GPLv2 and GPLv3 really one license nowadays with total 38%
popularity, or still two licenses? [Ben Tilly already made that suggestion
on this list.] And the classpath exception version of the GPL (at < 1%)
qualifies that license for yet a third spot on your "Top 20" list? 

*         Same with the LGPL; is that one license at (5% and 2%,
respectively) or one license at 7%?

*         Are these numbers based on lines of code created, numbers of
unique programs under the license, or number of copies of the software
actually distributed? For example, under what criteria does the zlib/libpng
license count? Wikipedia describes that license as intended for two specific
software libraries but "also used by many other free software packages."
That comment in Wikipedia is as vague and uninformative as the "< 1%" that
you cite in your table. I say this to point out that numbers on a list need
to be *interpreted* and *scaled* to be useful.

*         Is there any value to listing the 2-clause and the 3-clause BSD
licenses separately, given that no company lawyer in the world gives a damn
about the distinctions between them? Meanwhile, every conversation about the
BSD licenses on these OSI email lists concludes with the following great
suggestion: "Why don't you use the Apache License 2.0 instead?" If OSI is
ever going to recommend answers to easy legal questions, surely this is
among them. It serves absolutely no useful purpose at this stage of our
maturity to list each version of the BSD license separately – not even the
two you placed on your list.

*         You list the CDDL, a license created by a company that no longer
exists and whose successor company doesn't use it. Do we still count
deprecated licenses for as long as a even single copy of that code resides
in the wild? Not only that, but two versions of that single obsolete license
are individually listed in the "Top 20".

*         Wikipedia refers to the CPOL license as "mainly applied to content
that is being published on a single community site for software developers"
known as The Code Project. Wikipedia further reports that the CPOL license
is neither "open" as defined by OSI nor "free" as defined by FSF. Why is it
on your list at all?

/Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Odence [mailto:podence at blackducksoftware.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2014 2:48 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] FAQ entry (and potential website page?) on
"why standard licenses"?

In case it helps, Black Duck publishes a top licenses list based on the
number of projects in our KnowledgeBase (out of a current total of about a

million) that utilize each respective license.

<http://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses
>
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses

The webpage only shows the top 20, but if OSI thought that 30, say, was a
good number, we could provide those.

By the way, we are working on improving the presentation of the list, but I
didn¹t want to wait for that before throwing the thought into the mix.

On 4/28/14, 4:57 PM, "Richard Fontana" < <mailto:fontana at sharpeleven.org>
fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:

>On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 13:31:06 -0700

>Ben Tilly < <mailto:btilly at gmail.com> btilly at gmail.com> wrote:

> 

>> Suggested solution, can we use the word "common" instead of 

>> "standard"?  And our definition of common should be something 

>> relatively objective, like the top X licenses in use on github, minus >>
licenses (like the GPL v2) whose authors are pushing to replace with 

>> a different license.

> 

>You'd exclude the most commonly-used FLOSS license from "common"?

> 

> - RF

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