Thread: Open Source Licenses

http://www.koders.com/info.aspx?c=LicenseInfo

Anyone else feels that we are just perhaps starting to put too much weight into legal issues concerning the use and distribution of Open Source code? It's even more disheartening if we consider the above list is only a list of "common open source licenses" (sic).

Technically if I develop a software from scratch and intend to distribute it in an Open Source model, I'm free to either use a common license mechanism (like one of the above) or create my own. It feels that the trend is towards the latter though. The weight of the CPL is decreasing every passing day and corporate based Open Source licenses seem to want to inundate the market. Everyone wants their own license mechanism to essentially distribute Open Source software under restrictions to the CPL.

Now, I'm actually advocating that Open Source should be CPL only with maybe one or two variants. Some of these so called Open Source licenses really do not fully comply with the rules, which essentially makes them not Open Source, while others are nothing more than the CPL with the corporate moniker inserted here and there, making them redundant and confusing.

The Open Source world is becoming a mesh of license mechanisms in my opinion. It is distracting everyone from the mission behind the following quote from the OSI:

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

It is true that the objective is for this to be integrated into the highly competitive commercial world. However Open Source is at its core a mechanism to give away free technology while expecting earnings to be made from associated endeavours (RedHat having been one of the first to explore it). But by manipulating the concept to further limit access to the code and its distribution (some of Microsoft's so-called Open Source models being a blatant example), Open Source is becoming more a marketing mechanism where there is really little cooperative work towards the improvement of the software and more a hooking mechanism to further force the license client to that particular technology. Open Source related gains, the easy way.

Each and one of us is of course entitled to grant whatever rights they wish. However, I'm starting to think that the Open Source description was left too vague and is now not anymore a single concept, but a confusing mesh of interpretations.

Or was it ever intended to be? Care to debate?