I could license you to use this software, but then I�d have to kill you

“If open source struck you as strange when you first heard of
the concept, you don’t know the half of it. Developers, exercising
their legal right specify their own licensing terms, have come up
with some pretty wacky stuff. Fact or fiction? Some software is
only legal to use after you are dead.

“Just shy of 2000 different licenses cover the 230,000+ projects
in the Black Duck Knowledgebase. It’s important to note that the
top 10 licenses cover 93% of all projects and the top 20 almost
97%. Well over 60% are GPL. So, the vast bulk of projects are under
a small number of well-known licenses, and that’s a good thing. But
the other 3% of projects and 1980-odd licenses (and there are some
odd ones!) clearly constitute a “long tail.” Join me, won’t you,
for a journey to the outer reaches of that tail.

“Some licenses just sound weird. A good example is the Iggy
Wanna license. It sounds like a town in Pennsylvania, though I
suspect it’s probably a reference to Iggy Pop’s I Wanna be your
Dog. Beyond the title, the rest of the IWL reads like a normal
license.”

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