November 25, 2009, 11:21 am
One of the biggest headaches in the Open Source world is the myriad of licenses available , many of which are incompatible with one another. These incompatibilities are troublesome enough between two separate projects, but when multiple licenses are used within the same software, the difficulties grow exponentially. Yesterday was a blow against multiplicity, as Sun decided to do something about it.
The Open Source Initiative lists no less than sixty five licenses certified as Open Source through the Initiative’s license review process. These include the ubiquitous GPL and its family of variants, the Apache License, at least BSD licenses, the Mozilla Public License, the MIT license, and a host of lesser-known but nonetheless complicating licenses.
