Google Code expands open source license policy

From the ‘License Proliferation‘ files:

At long last, Google is opening up its Google Code project hosting site to all open source licenses.

Since the official launch of Google Code , Google has limited developers and project to a specific number of open source licenses. As of late last week, that restriction has been lifted and any Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source license is now welcome on that site.

Google’s Chris DiBona offers up a number of reasons in a blog post, as to why after so many years Google is now changing its tune. One reason he offers is that Google has already made its point that license proliferation is a bad thing. The other reason he offers is more practical.

“The longer form of the reason why is that we never really liked turning away projects that were under real, compatible licenses like the zlib or other permissive licenses, nor did we really like turning away projects under licenses that serve a truly new function, like the AGPL,” DiBona wrote. “We also think that there were inconsistencies in how we handled multi-licensed projects (for instance: a project that is under an Apache license, but has a zlib component.)”