The report, which was commissioned in 2005, was initially designed to address the threat licenses pose to the vitality of open source.
“Interference between different open source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem," a spokesman for the License Proliferation Committee said in 2005, when the report was commissioned.
The Licensing Proliferation Committee had initially been charged with putting licenses into “recommended,” “non recommended” and “other” tiers, but that assignment proved too difficult, according to committee member Diane Peters, who serves as general counsel for the Open Source Development Labs.
“We struggled with even categorizing the licenses into three categories and came to the realization that the various business models had different needs and there needed to be some flexibility there," Peters said.
The report categorizes licenses in three categories: Special purposes licenses; licenses that are redundant, including those that are non reusable and popular or widely used licenses or those with strong communities of users.
“While the licenses themselves are not ranked, it is worth noting that the report encourages developers to consider using one of the nine licenses in the 'widely used and strong community' category,” Peters said.
According to Peters, the next step for the committee is to find a way to fit new licenses into the categories and, if possible, develop a recommendation around the categories.
The report was released to the public at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.