When it comes to picking open source licenses, developer community has this kid-in-the-salon patience. Dealing with necessary evil is both time consuming and confusing as hell.

With nearly 73 open source licenses ( and many more in non-OSI/FSF space), it’s never easy for new developers to take one license and run with it. Open source licenses, as they exist, have more similarity with food items than with legal contracts they aim to establish. Some developers prefer hot spices and some prefer extra salt. This causes all sorts of headache for - developers who want to reuse the code and user community working hard to stay clear of any legal liabilities.

Bruce Perens, long time open source advocate, has written a sort of mea culpa post, elaborating on the license proliferation problem. Instead of using license attributes such as copyright or copyleft, he is simplifying by stating the license objectives:

1. A “gift” license:

This is as unrestrictive as possible, which allows the licensee to combine the work with either Open Source or proprietary software.

2. A “sharing with rules” license:

This says “be my partner” even to companies you might not always trust, for example your worst competitors in the market, because if they improve the product, they have to share.

3. An “in-between” license:

This is for making software libraries under the “sharing with rules” paradigm, but which are usable in proprietary software.

With these three sorts of licenses, we can fulfill most of the different business purposes that there might be for an Open Source development.

Further, he has mapped most appropriate FSF approved licenses to these three objectives. Apache License 2.0 is a gift license, GPL 3 fits the bill for ’sharing with rules’ license and in-between license category goes to LGPL 3.

SaaS, and it’s recent avatar of cloud computing, is a different beast. Affero GPL3 takes care of the SaaS clause. It’s not as popular as other three licenses and that says a lot about the lack of education in this matter.

If we were deciding this on pure legal merit then probably this would have been long settled. Like religion, developers have this, sometimes irrational, devotion to a particular school of thought. I can already see people complaining about GPL 3 and complete omission of BSD or MIT license.

So take Perens advice as it’s a great way to simplify the debate. In-fact insist on this simplified classification when ‘commercial’ open source company pitches any product.