The Open Source Initiative is going to try to stop the pointless proliferation of different open source licences which the group says "has become a significant barrier to open-source deployment", reports eWeek. In future, "Approved licenses must meet three new criteria of being a) nonduplicative, b) clear and understandable, and c) reusable."
The problem is that code developed under different licences all gets mixed together in implementations, producing a legal quagmire. OSI says:
"The hard truth is this: In order to address the problem of license proliferation effectively, both sides—both partisans of a particular license and companies—will have to give up their vanity projects. The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close."
Comment: This move is at least four years overdue and is a belated attempt to shut the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The irony is that the Open Source Initiative is basically responsible for creating the problem: if Eric Raymond had stuck to his GNUs and kept faith with Richard Stallman's GPL, it wouldn't have happened.
Of course, almost all commercial software producers -- such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft -- find the GPL unpalatable, so the open source movement would have been slower to develop. But it would have avoided the current situation, where a lot of "open source" code uses licenses that are incompatible with the one used for GNU/Linux.
