Bruce Perens: "How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?"

Bruce Perens has a great new article over at Datamation yesterday entitled "How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?" I spend a fair amount of time working with projects and companies on their open source initiatives and on how they should manage them. Bruce has done an excellent job boiling down a lot of the decisions about licensing to a few simple choices. I am gratified to see these line up with the same recommendations that I have been making for a while now. Bruce clearly explains why you should only need to choose from at most four licenses and the basic reasons you might choose each one.

While choice of license is a critical decision to get an open source project moving in the right direction, it's not the only important step to take early in a project. It's also critical to establish an Intellectual Property Policy of some sort, specifically to govern how you will accept contributions from others outside the initial team. Will you require contributor agreements? Who will hold the copyrights for the source code in your project? Will you centralize this control so one entity can do things like defend license/copyright violations and so you can change licenses in the future? Mozilla should serve as a cautionary tale for what can happen when you run into problems with your license and you didn't manage intellectual property cleanly from the start.