Do we need a new FOSS license?

Come on, admit it: You've been involved in at least one (probably 3 or more) licensing "discussions" with your fellow FOSS peers. :P Like you probably already know (and like I covered in one of my previous posts), these "discussions" revolve mainly around whether or not the GPL is, in fact, a truly free license. I'm not going to discuss that here (for brevity), but what I will discuss is whether an "compromise" license that sits right between the GPL and a permissive license in terms of restrictions is possible.

First, we need to know what our new license can and cannot do. According to the Open Source Definition (which you can read for yourself here), here are some things our new license couldn't do:

• Prevent commercial re-distribution. Commercial re-distribution is very different from proprietary re-distribution, by the way


• Prevent (possibly derivative) products issued under the same license as ours


• Restrict other software distributed on the same medium as ours

Okay, so now we now what we can't do, let's figure out what we can do.

• The biggest problem most people have with the GPL is that it prevents other, non-GPL, FOSS software from using GPL'ed products (because the licenses are incompatible). We need to figure out a way to solve this issue in order to come up with a true "compromise" license.


• The counter-argument against permissive licenses is that they allow proprietary derivatives of your project. Whether or not this is an issue is completely up to you, but for the purposes of this post, I'll assume the answer is "yes."


• The Open Source Definition does allow open-source licenses to "pick and choose" what derivative projects can be licensed under; the most notable open-source license that does this is the GPL - you can derive from a GPL product and use the AGPL for your code if you so choose

What if we could allow anyone to derive from a product licensed under our hypothetical license as long as they used our new license, or an OSI-approved license? While this has the obvious disadvantage of preventing a BSD-licensed project which uses our hypothetical project from being used in a proprietary product, it's a pretty big step towards an actual "compromise" license.

That's as good a compromise as I can think of for now. Hopefully I can think of a better one in the future. :)