Hey- We've had discussions previously about adopting a license that has more widespread use than our modified BSD license. The motivation for making a change is increase the likelihood that others can use OpenLayers without having to direct specific licensing questions to a very small pool of people (perhaps a pool of one).
The 2-clause BSD, referred to as "Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License" looks good to me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause). This license differs from our current license (http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers/license.txt) in a number of ways: 1) The 2-clause license omits the non-endorsement clause. Our current license says that nobody can use the OpenLayers name to endorse products that use OpenLayers without specific written permission. To my knowledge, we have given specific written permission once. There are enough other uses of the OpenLayers name in promoting software that uses OpenLayers that I think we are not going to enforce this non-endorsement clause. 2) The 2-clause license doesn't contain any language about patent rights. Our current language about patent rights is not included in other common forms of the BSD (OpenLayers and FeatureServer are the two uses I could quickly find). Removing this specific language would align our license with licenses used by many other projects - reducing the chance of licensing questions that are specific to our project. I'm open to hearing proposals to use another license. I'm +1 on changing to the 2-clause BSD. Tim -- Tim Schaub OpenGeo http://opengeo.org/ Expert service straight from the developers. _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list d...@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/openlayers-dev
