In a recent post, I examined differences among the licenses of four different consortia. By and large, the licenses under which standards development organizations (SDOs) and consortia offer their work are unique to the particular SDO or consortium. Some are similar, but it is hard to find two independent SDOs or consortia using an identical license (can anyone cite examples otherwise?). This diversity of licenses is increasingly problematic as convergence among standards begins to occur and as enterprises look to apply multiple standards to meet cross-industry requirements.

Open source software ("OSS" or sometimes "FLOSS" - for the Free/Libre/Open Source Software variety) licenses have been the target of much scrutiny and the source of much consternation for those wanting to combine work made available under different licenses. However, compared to the current state of SDO and consortia licenses, a bit of progress has been made in the OSS world in reining-in the unnecessary proliferation of new licenses. The Open Source Initiative has helped in this regard. OSI reviews licenses for consistency with the "open source definition" and publishes a list of approved open source licenses. Restraint on the proliferation of licenses also is provided by project hosting venues such as Google Code, which limits projects to one of nine of open source software licenses and to one of two Creative Commons licenses if a separate license is desired for documentation.