For Approval: The Simplified BSD License

[Chuck Swiger]

Donovan Hawkins wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Sep 2007, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>> ...and some BSD licensors are unwilling to use MIT...
> 
> Why is that exactly? The proliferation of BSD-like licenses is enormous, 
> and I don't quite understand the reason for it when so many of the 
> licenses are so similar.

You're certainly right-- the last time I checked, there were over thirty minor 
textual variants of the BSD license in the standard C library sources.

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.

-- 
-Chuck