Why the proliferation of open source licenses?

Posted by dwj on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by dwj
Published on 2008-08-22T18:20:35Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 18:44 UTC
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licensing

Is the proliferation of open source licenses just another example of programmers living NYI (Not Invented Here) syndrome? I know there are some big differences between some of the big licenses (e.g., GPL, Apache, BSD) but when you start looking to see many projects creating their own licenses. Why?

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_licenses
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/licenses_summary.html

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