The Open Source Initiative is devising ways to cut down the rising number of open source licences, as the issue of licence proliferation slowing the spread of open source software was on the front burner at this week's LinuxWorld conference in Boston.
Sam Greenblatt, a member of board of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) -- which is working with OSI on the issue -- and senior vice-president at Computer Associates International in charge of Linux strategy, told ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com that he is actively working on a proposal for consolidating the number of open source licences down to three from the current figure of more than 50.
"You'll see some movement on that in the next six to eight weeks," he said on Tuesday.
Having too many licences complicates potential sales to corporate customers, which may have to do extensive legal reviews and manage multiple kinds of open source contracts.
"It's confusing as hell to explain to customers," said Michael Olson, CEO of open source database company Sleepycat Software. "It's confusing… because we are just wrapping our heads around what [different licences] mean to us as businesspeople."
Greenblatt, and other industry executives, believe the number of licences can be dramatically distilled down.
"Eventually there should be three licences: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL and, of course, there will be the BSD because you can't rid of it," he said.
Greenblatt added that elements of other licences, such as Sun's CDDL, could be used to form the short list of open source licences.
Computer Associates itself devised a separate licence, called the CA Trusted Open Source License, when it created an open source project around its Ingres r3 database. But it now regrets that decision, said Tony Gaughan, the company's senior vice-president of development. "If we had taken more counsel, we might have done things differently," he said.
Working with Greenblatt on the effort to winnow the number of open source licences is Martin Fink, vice-president of Linux at HP and an OSDL board member, and Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation.
At a keynote presentation at LinuxWorld on Tuesday, Fink, who is chair of the OSDL's intellectual property subcommittee, criticised the role the OSI has had in certifying licences. He said he has asked OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen to work with the OSI to address the problem.
"Clearly, the OSI has not internalised its critical role to ensure that the licensing underpinnings upon which open source is built remain a force to be reckoned with," Fink said.
"This current path of approving licences -- based simply on the compliance to a specification rather than on the basis of a new licence's ability to further innovate the business model of the open source industry -- represents to me a clear and present danger to the very core of what makes open source work," Fink said. "If this is the path the OSI continues to choose, then it is choosing a path towards irrelevance."
For his part, OSI's Nelson said that he is still studying the issue. The OSI could set tougher standards for approving open source licences to discourage groups from creating their own. Also, cutting down on the number of licences may not necessarily address the issue of code-sharing if organisations continue to choose incompatible licences among a shorter list.
"If we said to Sun, 'No way, no how, are you going to get your licence approved,' they probably would have gone with the MPL," Nelson said, referring to the Mozilla Public License.
One idea that Nelson has considered is to have a tiered system of open source licence certifications. A "gold" licence would apply to the top four or five licences that are used in the great majority of open source projects, he said, and a "silver" licence would those that are used by fewer projects.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
