This is a known issue: the Open Source Initiative has a License Proliferation Committee, which recommends the use of one of eight licenses that are "popular and widely used or with strong communities."
- Apache License, 2.0
- New BSD license
- GNU General Public License (GPL version 2 or 3)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL version 2.1 or 3)
- MIT license
- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
- Common Development and Distribution License
- Eclipse Public License
Other licenses are classified as: "redundant" (e.g., the NCSA license is redundant with BSD), "special use" or "non-reusable" (e.g., the NASA license, the Apple Public Source License), "superceded" (e.g., MPL v1.0), and so on.
