What is coherent open source?

Question

What is "coherent" open source? How is it different from other forms of open source?

Answer 1

According to a recent slashdot post Bruce Perens has declared:

The "Coherent Open Source" plan asks creators of new work to place it under one of only three licenses: The Affero GPL 3, LGPL3, or Apache 2. These three were chosen because they are all compatible with each other, are all approved of by both OSI and FSF, and they provide a range of permissions suitable for different applications.

The premise here is that having so many different Open Source licenses is in general harmful to the community, due to the combinatorial problem and the need to understand so many of them, and is simply not necessary because each additional license does not bring a high value in innovation or new functionality -- at least in a way that supports the community rather than some company. Yet OSI goes on approving new ones. And the new license submissions tend to depart from the respect for freedom that has made Free Software / Open Source so successful.

If we plan a coherent strategy and go forward with it from here, we start to solve the problem of too many licenses.

All three licenses address the problem of software patents in some way. There is much text shared between AGPL3 and LGPL3, so the effect is sort of like having to learn 2.5 licenses rather than 3. And of course AGPL3 addresses the SaaS problem by requiring SaaS providers to share their modifications, just as the GPL required people to share modifications before SaaS. We should be asking more of companies like Google and Amazon today, since they get so much value from us. But without deviating from the ideals of Free Software / Open Source as some license proposals do.

The biggest criticisms are that it's difficult to combine with these licenses if your project is "GPL2 with no later version". There are several ways for either side of the combination to address that, but they aren't automatic. And I heard from a lawyer who really didn't like the scheme, but as far as I can tell it's just because he wants to do more lawyering.

I am all for the community needing attorneys only when it's time to enforce their licenses, not to figure out their own operations.