The Santa Clara, California-based server and software company is retiring its Sun Industry Standards Source Licence, said Simon Phipps, director of Sun's Open Source Office. And he hinted there may be more retirements to come.
"It's actually a very fine licence, designed to encourage forks and derived works to support the same file formats and standards as the original work. However, it's not been used by very many projects, and I don't think having it on Sun's list of preferred licences is appropriate any longer," Phipps said in his blog on Friday. "We're taking a practical step today, the first of several I hope."
The Open Source Initiative, the organisation that bestows official open-source status on licences, has been trying to cut down on the proliferation of open-source licences. Having too many licences can result in islands of incompatible software that can't be intermixed and complicates legal reviews for those thinking of using or contributing to open-source projects.
Part of the nonproliferation effort involves encouraging companies to retire their own open-source licences. Intel retired the Intel Open Source Licence in March.
Retiring the SISSL means that the OpenOffice.org software will be covered by just one licence, the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), according to the project's Web site.
"Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-licence scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their licence scheme as soon as the development cycle allows," the site said.
Sun prefers a different open-source licence, the Community Development and Distribution Licence, which is a variant of the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL). The CDDL governs OpenSolaris and the Glassfish Java server software project.
Phipps' counterpart at rival Hewlett-Packard, Martin Fink, has called for a radical reduction in open-source licences, which currently number more than 50. In particular, he's called on Sun in an August speech to scrap the CDDL. Phipps, though, dismissed Fink's tactic as "shallow and attention-grabbing rhetoric."
