Open Source has suffered from the fact that OSI didn't make a minimal recommended license list. We couldn't forsee the future, and we caused the license combinatorial problem. Because there are so many licenses, and because they are incompatible with each other, the legal load on developers and others who would redistribute the software is larger than it should be. There are over 5000 combinations of just two licenses, and millions of larger combinations. There is now a sizeable cadre of lawyers and other experts whose occupation is to sort out this problem for companies that distribute Open Source software in their products.

We must work to minimize the legal load on developers. We have to do better at this than OSI did. Promoting, and educating about, the recommended license list is an effective way to do that.

The recommended licenses:

• Will be a close-to-minimal list, to help developers to avoid the license-combinatorial problem.
• Will be compatible with each other, because licenses that are incompatible with each other prevent the combination of Open Hardware designs.
• Will include:
  • A gift-style license (like BSD or MIT)
  • A strongly reciprocal license (like TAPR Open Hardware License or GPL).
  • One similar to GPL-with-exception to serve the function of LGPL while sharing most of the text of the strongly reciprocal license.

The fact that a license is on the Certified list and not the Recommended list is not a comment upon the license, its authors, or its organization. It's simply due to the strong benefit of having a minimal list that we must make choices between alternatives, even arbitrary choices between equal alternatives.

Limitations

Note that Hardware Isn't Generally Copyrightable. Thus, there are severe limitations upon the enforcement of the licenses of hardware designs that do not exist for licenses applied to software.