“Licensing simplicity was one of the goals of the Open Source
Initiative. By having licenses pre-approved as ‘freedom promoting’
by a group of experts, the plan was to save developers from having
to make decisions about which licenses were OK and which were a
problem. I regard it as a huge irony that this approach was so
successful that the number of approved licenses has proliferated to
the point where one needs legal advice to choose between them. So
one of the very first things we did when I became Sun’s Chief Open
Source Officer in 2005 was to start the process of simplifying
Sun’s approach to licensing by retiring an old open source license,
SISSL, which I assume no responsible company will now choose to
use…”