Further, any derivative work need not be free and one can charge for it as you would for proprietary software.The subtle licensing criteria between open source generally and free software is further highlighted when you consider that some licenses are not compatible. For instance, programs/source code distributed under PHP License is not compatible with GNU GPL since GNU GPL is a copyleft license. Which raises a couple of licensing issues:
(1)Why are there different criteria under different licenses for open source software? Presently, there are about 54 licenses certified by OSI as open source - a tribute to OSI's philosophy - which many now see as an unnecessary proliferation of licenses, an issue that forced OSI to admit that -"OSI's approach on the development and distribution problems involved building as many different bridges as possible between developers and the corporate world. In doing this, we accepted a proliferation of new licenses. This is a problem in that although physical bridges between communities don't interfere with each other, licenses do. Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success."
To address the issue of proliferation, OSI plans to take all existing OSI approved licenses and group them into three tiers: (i) preferred, (ii) recommended but not preferred, and (iii) not recommended. This is likely to create more confusion. One would then ask why an OSI certified license would be OSI "not recommended" license. Would a 'not recommended' tag not be deemed as de-approval (though OSI says its not). It would be 'preferable' not to have certified such license as OSI approved in the first place.
(2) Why are some licenses not compatible with others? We may well appreciate that compatibility goes beyond the issue of license proliferation. For example, the FSF considers all versions of the Apache License incompatible with Version 2 of the GNU GPL. About version 2.0 of the Apache License, they say:
"The Apache Software License is incompatible with the GPL because it has a specific requirement that is not in the GPL: it has certain patent termination cases that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)"
Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which publishes the Apache License, has adequately replied to FSF's statement, stating that ASF does not share the same goals as FSF. For the time being, the controversy rages on. Compatibility is really a relationship issue; free software movement and the open source movement can be likened to two political camps within the free software community. While it can be argued that GNU GPL is not compatible with a number of licenses because the philosophy behind GNU GPL is freedom - which proponents of free software have cried themselves hoarse from the rooftops for decades now - GNU GPL itself publishes a list of free/open source software licenses that are GPL incompatible, distinguishing between non-copyleft and 'not strong copyleft'. Even, copyleft licenses like xinetd have also not been spared and was held incompatible because it places extra restrictions on redistribution of modified versions that contradict the redistribution requirements in the GPL. Don't they share the same goals? Yet the free software movement has complained that to be lumped together with open source software is restrictive for free software since open source software allegedly has a much weaker criterion than free software. Then one may ask, what is the criteria for determining compatibility with GNU GPL even for copyleft free software licenses? At least FSF is not intending to classify licenses in the same manner as OSI - for now.
(3) Don't some of these licenses support a 'one way' street attitude described by John Udell in the Open Source Citizenship where developers are encouraged to take and not give back to the community. Or it could be akin to the situation described by Stallman where commercial developers invited to the "Open Source Developers Day" meeting in August 1998 said they intend to make only a part of their work free software (or open source) since the focus of their business is on developing proprietary add-ons (software or manuals) to sell to the users of the free software. According to Stallman, those developers requested that this should be regarded as legitimate, as part of the community, because some of the money is donated to free software development. Whichever way you look at it, it is a dangerous trend for the future of open source software.
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