[License-discuss] Reply to various recent postings on the crayon license issue

[Tom Callaway]

On 12/20/2011 03:45 AM, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Can you tell me how many licenses are in Fedora? If it's 300, it's
> something of a self-created problem, but then you'd be in lots of company.

It is 300+. And yes, it is a bit of a self-created problem, although,
I'd be willing to bet that if we spent the time to graph the usage of
the licenses, we'd have a lot of items easily shown as "outliers". The
very nature of the success of Fedora reflected in its growth will reveal
the odd and the unusual licenses in the undergrowth, especially as we
start to package and include items which were previously obscure/niche
(think Bioinformatics, academia, pharma, quant, etc, etc).

I also don't think it is a real problem that the OSI list doesn't have
everything that Fedora has. IMHO, the OSI has the burden of being a
public face in the battle to minimize license proliferation. Fedora just
reflects the reality on the battlefield.

~tom

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Fedora Project