A Sign of the Times: Debating the Need for Software Licensing
I often find myself writing about the positive influence of collaboration and knowledge sharing that exists not just in the agile culture but also in software development as a whole. One of the primary ways this communal behavior occurs is found in open source software. The forward-thinking nature of OSS has grown so popular that it’s even been adopted by the US government.
Those of you practicing agile development, with your dedication to “constantly improving,” must then say to yourselves, “OSS is great, but what’s post-OSS?” The answer: POSS could be relatively simple—if it weren’t for those pesky software licenses. Wikipedia lists close to fifty different software licenses, though; surely lawyers are creating more each day.
ReadWriteWeb recently claimed that it’s absolutely time to move further into POSS, as evidenced by the fact that “the vast majority of projects on GitHib don’t appear to carry any license terms at all,” a point made at this year’s Linux Collaboration Summit. Giving the credit to a younger generation of developers for this shift away from licensing, RW’s article quotes Redmonk analyst James Governor, who in an almost zen-like summation explains that this generation lives by a belief that “the code is all.”
RWW’s Matt Asay goes on to note, "…we have a highly permissive license culture that helps to foster the development of code in the early phases of open-source development, which graduates to Apache-style licensing as projects catch on. Lawyers can rest easy."
Has anyone ever seen a lawyer rest easy? I sure haven’t. There’s far too much money, especially when government and corporate licensing agreements are dangling in front of them, for lawyers to simply sit back and relax.
Software licensing lawyer Mark Radcliffe also thinks free and open source software, or FOSS, without licenses is a problem. He believes not only thatnFOSS and POSS initiatives are harmful for the corporations that may choose to use OSS code but also that the entire concept “undercuts the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code.”
While Radcliffe does not provide specific numbers to prove his claim that “most FOSS developers” feel this way, he’s not alone in rejecting the push by this younger generation of coders and their refusal to take licensing and permissions seriously. Some even dispute the aim for license-free software as being nothing more than sheer laziness, or at best a flimsy political statement.
What’s your opinion of license-free POSS? Is it potentially harmful, or is it another example of the knowledge sharing that makes the development community so wonderful?
