Out-Licensing

Licensors decide what license to use for their open source software. If at all possible, licensors should use an existing template license. Please don't invent your own. The open source community is not seeking new licenses to analyze and interpret.

The proliferation of open source licenses creates a serious problem: It risks additional fragmentation of the public commons of free software. While software under some academic licenses can be combined without restriction, combining software under different reciprocal licenses—particularly the more complex reciprocal licenses used by large companies—requires that lawyers or skilled licensing professionals review each of the licenses for incompatibilities. Even where the differences ...

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