David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
More generally: lots of companies think they have to roll their own. What can be done to lead them away from this bad idea? e.g. are there already essays or other resources as to this? Why do they think this is a good idea?
If you don't want to link to his longer papers, David A. Wheeler has "FLOSS License Proliferation: Still a problem" at http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2008/08/20/
I think Netscape are responsible for this, using their own-branded license to be free software but give themselves special privileges, as criticsed by Richard Stallman's On the Netscape Public License http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/netscape-npl.html
This was bundled up with the Open Source Initiative - I think Netscape were at the RMS-excluding Freeware Summit that ultimately led to OSI? So I feel OSI saw the new license and made a clear and overt way for it to approve new licenses. OSI talked about that approval process a lot early on, but has recently acknowledged that license proliferation is bad: http://www.opensource.org/proliferation
Seems a bit irritating that Netscape has been omitted from OSI's history of the issue, though.
debian has been arguing against proliferation for *years*. The Debian Free Software Guidelines FAQ number 5 discourages it. http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq As you know, I think debian usually does the right thing on this.
I've not found anything showing FSF or FSFE advising against writing new licences. Maybe it's there, but it's not prominent. Is this surprising? FSF has produced not only GPLv3, but also AGPL, FDL, SFDL and maybe others while I've not been looking so closely. The FAQ isn't a great help - I have met some people that read http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL as an active encouragement to write a customised licence!
It seems like Ciaran O'Riordan wrote something which was linked from http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/How-GPLv3-tackles-license-proliferat... but clicking "How GPLv3 tackles license proliferation" today just redisplays the same page for me, and not the column. It doesn't seem to be available on the FSFE site, either.
So, personally, I think FSF and FSFE are the weakest groups against customised licenses just now and could do a lot to help by adding prominent essays to their sites.
Hope that helps,