DivaBlog

I'm sitting in Larry Rosen's morning session at OSDL Summit today. Larry is making the point that license proliferation is bad, bad, bad...and mistakenly using the CDDL as an example of part of the problem. I have to say this irks me just a bit. CDDL was written to solve a problem which has caused much of the actual license proliferation, namely, that in order to use what I'll call the "Mozilla model" (meaning the hybrid of BSD and GPL under which Netscape chose to license Mozilla code 6 years ago)...you are actually forced to create a new license. MPL language is very specific. It not only names Netscape and Mozilla as Original Contributors...it stipulates Santa Clara, California as the venue and legal jurisdiction for any legal actions associated with the MPL.

Most of the "vanity" licenses seen at OSI are somehow derivatives of the MPL coming from large or small vendors. For PR reasons they want their name (or their project name) on the license and they have to change the name of the MPL anyway so why not submit a new one? They think as long as they are modifying MPL, why not make one or two additional changes? Add to this the fact that lawyers write licenses, and lawyers are sort of like coders...except their "code" is license text. The temptation to bit-twiddle as they edit to "make it their own" is enormous. As David Berlind has noted in his blog

"The result has been a balkanization of the open source software world into provinces whose borders are represented by license incompatibilities that prevent the unfettered intermingling and sharing of code that's theoretically one of the cornerstones of open source religion..."

OSI has long maintained that proliferation licenses are their own reward...In other words that companies who choose this sort of licensing won't ultimately get the benefit of the "open source effect" and will hopefully learn the lesson that sharing is better. This is a long process, not an "at the speed of business" sort of process and that has been frustrating for those watching the open source revolution from their leather office chairs.

But back to CDDL. If you consider it on its own (as a license, without all the FUD & speculation around Sun's intention in applying it to OpenSolaris) you'll see that its really meant to be reused. Its a "template" license, without pre-set jurisdiction, without brand-name issues. Its definitely not just another license. I would like to see OSI add a requirement going forward that new proposed licenses be required to prove how and why their license is different from all the predecessors.