Java library licensing continued

Charles Miller suggests forking the LGPL. He does bring up the interesting question of what license should people use in place of the LGPL? Charles suggests that we should “”visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license.”

I’m not sure how one would “visibly and widely” annoint some other license without just having projects switch to that license. If the OSI were to list “recommended” licenses for certain purposes, that might help people work through the quagmire. As Fred mentions, there are definitely good licenses in existence already.

BSD provides basically free access to do anything with the code.

Apache provides free access, but includes a clause requiring attribution.

The CPL (invented by IBM, this is the license for Eclipse and other tools) allows for commercial use and provides protection for the open source authors so that they don’t get sued.

The Mozilla Public License has a provision that requires changes to the code that comes in the Mozilla package to be released under the MPL, but does not make any such requirements of code that uses the Mozilla code base.

My guess is that MPL-type licensing is what many open source library developers want… So, I wonder what the odds are that OSI could put together a well-researched page on this topic?