[Discuss] free/open licenses could discourage participation just because they're unusual

Matt Maier blueback09 at gmail.com
Fri May 2 15:19:50 UTC 2014


http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/heartbleed-postmortem-openssls-license-discouraged-scrutiny-241781

An interesting theory about why OpenSSL got so little development help is
that it has a custom license which is incompatible with standard FLOSS
licenses.

"*Developers would rather not deal with these issues; as such, they use the
code as-is and do the least necessary to comply with the license*"

Does anybody know if there is data to support this theory? Do a significant
number of developers shy away from projects just because they're unfamiliar
with, or annoyed by, a slightly off-of-center license?

-Matt
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