Sorting Out the Sharing License Shambles | Techdirt

“At the heart of the various movements based around sharing -- free software, open content, open access etc. -- lie specially drawn-up licenses that grant permissions beyond the minimal ones of copyright. This approach has worked well -- too well, in fact, since it has led to a proliferation of many different licenses: the Open Source Initiative recognizes over 60 of them for open source. That's a problem because slight incompatibilities between them often make it impossible to create combined works drawing on elements released under different licenses. To reduce these incompatibilities there has been a general move towards license simplification...”