An explanation of the difficulty of solving licenseproliferation in one sentence

[Jeremy McLeod]

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