I have been choosing a license for my ficticious programming language, Pepper. One consideration is the complexity of the (combination of) license(s) used. Complexity may be related to length, so for your enjoyment, here are the lengths of some popular licenses:
Is it a coincidence I’ve decided to use the MIT License?
Here’s how I made it (on my Ubuntu Linux 12.04 system):
#!/bin/bash declare -A LICENSES LICENSES[Apache]=file:///usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0 LICENSES[GPL2]=file:///usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 LICENSES[GPL3]=file:///usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3 LICENSES[BSD]=file:///usr/share/common-licenses/BSD LICENSES[Artistic]=file:///usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic LICENSES[MIT]=http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt LICENSES[Mozilla]=http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/index.txt LICENSES[Python]=http://hg.python.org/cpython/raw-file/tip/LICENSE LICENSES[Eclipse]=http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html function wordcounts() { for K in "${!LICENSES[@]}"; do { echo `lynx -dump ${LICENSES[$K]} | wc -w` $K }; done } wordcounts | sort -n | awk '{print $2 " " $1}' > data.txt gnuplot <<END set terminal png large enhanced font "Helvetica,11" set output 'license-length.png' unset key set style fill solid set title "Number of words in common Free and Open Source licenses" plot 'data.txt' using (column(0)):2:(0.5):(\$0):xtic(1) with boxes lc variable; END rm data.txt
Shame you didn’t include the boost licence. I’d like to see how that stacks up (It would certainly be on the far left somewhere)
BOOST is 215 – just to the right of BSD I think. I considered BOOST, but went for MIT as it’s more widely used.