A License to Copy

I’ve spent some time these past few days looking for a project to do a bug fix on for the bug fix project. So far, no luck. However, while looking over some projects in class today, I cam to the realization that I don’t know much about open source licenses. This was pointed out to me as I wondered aloud if the project I was looking at was open source, at which point my more knowledgable friend to my left (I’m sorry, I forgot who exactly said it!) showed me where the license was, and assured me that it wasn’t just a random string of letters. The thing is, I’ve seen open source licenses before (Actually only the ISC), and I was confused why it wasn’t the same license I had seen before. There’s more than one?

Oh boy, are there more than one. I’m sure to most people (or person) reading this, it seems like common knowledge, but I guess it just never reached me. A few minutes of google searching brought me to both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative lists for recognized licenses. There’s at least 60 listed for the OSI, and the GNU page has over 100! That’s just ludicrous, and that’s only the licenses they recognize!

Reading through some of the licenses, it seems there’s a big issue with cross license compatibility. Some things provisioned in some licenses don’t cover using software covered by other licenses in the same project, even if the liceneses say mostly the same thing. I guess thats just how these things go. As soon as something exists that could be standardized, a million people try to make their own standardization. While I can’t say for sure which licenses are the best, I can see on the websites listed that some are much more popular than others. I also read that only a few of these licenses have actually been tested in a court of law. So I guess that majority use should be drawn to the popular licenses that have so far been upheld in court.

Long story short, I have now know a little bit more about the backstory of licenses, but there are just too many to choose from. GPL or ISC it is.