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Open Source License Proliferation: Helpful Diversity Or Hopeless Confusion?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
Open Source License Proliferation: Helpful Diversity Or Hopeless Confusion?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
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A decade ago, I observed that licenses were the "unnoticed force" behind free and open source software ("FOSS"). Since then, legal scholarship on FOSS licensing has gone from a trickle to a torrent. Likewise, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists (among others) have begun to focus on FOSS licensing, each from their own academic perspectives. FOSS programmers themselves (known as "hackers" in the FOSS community) have refocused on FOSS licensing, most notably by revising the most venerable FOSS license, the GNU General Public License ("GPL"), for the first time in more than fifteen years.
One prominent issue among hackers and business …