I have written here often of license proliferation, and along the way have been overly snarky toward Michael Tiemann of Red Hat and the Open Source Initiative, as the number of licenses kept growing even after he held up his hand to say stop.
So it is only fair here to mention a success story, and to give credit where it is due.
The Common Public License has been merged into Eclipse.
An FAQ on the merger notes that the two licenses were already very similar. “A quick read of the two licenses will quickly show that they are very very close,” writes Mike Milinkovich, who heads Eclipse.
Our own Ed Burnette called Milinkovich “director for life” in his post on this, proving that I’m not the only snarky one at ZDNet. At minimum Mike wants the chance to take the Madden way out.
What this illustrates is an important lesson in fighting license proliferation. It takes two to negotiate any solution. And this is not something the OSI can do all by itself.
It takes a village and a negotiator.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
