Confusion and controversy about Open Source licensing did not start with current Free Software Foundation efforts to revise the GNU General Public License (GPL). Nor will emergence of an acceptable GPL V3 -- or of a revised Lesser GPL or Affero GPL (thanks Dana Blankenhorn) -- make OS licensing much less problematical for enterprise users. Concerns are both alleviated and complicated by a profusion of options that range from GPL's communitarianism to the Common Public License's collaborative focus to BSD's laissez-faire liberality. The variety of schemes in use creates opportunity: witness, for instance, Apache's magnificent munificence. But one must also take care to avoid bait-and-switch, pretend Open Source licenses that promise freedom in both common senses, liberty and price, but ultimately deliver neither.
The Apache Software Foundation is in a dispute with Sun Microsystems over a license for the Java technology compatibility kit needed for the Apache Harmony project.
On the other hand, however, The 451 Group's Zachary suggested that perhaps Novell will be able to achieve binary compatibility with other Linux distros by working with industry organizations such as the Linux Foundation
"There are some opportunities to stay in sync, even in a fork," according to the analyst.
Over time, more and more projects currently released under the GPL adopt the Linux license, because it is more legally precise and more comprehensible to the average developer than either the GPLv2 or GPLv3. Eventually, Linux distributions switch over to the Linux license, leaving only a small branch of GPLv3 (or v4 or v5) code to be downloaded separately (if the user chooses to do so).
