HP exec calls for fewer open-source licenses

IDG News Service - The large number of licenses that software vendors are using to release source code is becoming a significant issue for developers and users, according to Hewlett-Packard Co.'s top Linux executive.
"A lot of people don't realize that today there are dozens and dozens of open-source licenses," Martin Fink, vice president of Linux at HP, said in a speech at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week. Fink added that he had counted 52 different open-source licenses and predicted that the number would likely increase by the end of the conference.
Open-source licenses are approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a nonprofit group that has certified software licenses from organizations as diverse as the NASA, MIT and Apple Computer Inc.
But according to Fink, there are already too many such licenses. "There really is no value, and there is only confusion in having that many licenses," he said.
To date, HP hasn't seen the need to create a new license for its own contributions, choosing instead to release its software under existing open-source licenses, Fink said. "I approve on average three to five open-source projects and contributions every single week," he said. "If I have never had to create a new license, I have a really hard time understanding why you think you do."
Fink called on open-source developers in the LinuxWorld audience to try to reduce the number of software licenses. "Let's look for ways to start consolidating the existing set of licenses so that we remove the confusion that having that many licenses has on our industry," he said.
The issue has attracted the attention of the OSI board and has the potential to become serious, said Eric Raymond, president of the OSI. There is a "strong chance" that the organization will be more restrictive in the number of licenses it certifies, though it hasn't put such a policy in place, he said in an e-mail interview.
The majority of OSI-certified licenses are used in a very small number of works, Raymond said. "All but a dozen of these are vanity licenses, usually uttered by a corporate legal department with too much time on its hands, used on exactly one project," he said.
Any confusion brought on by the proliferation of open-source licensing is probably a greater issue for open-source vendors, which must ensure that the products they sell don't have incompatible licenses. But it is also an issue for customers, said Chris Hjelm, chief technology officer at Orbitz LLC, which uses a variety of