The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.

According to the Initiative, the API will allow third parties to ‘become license-aware’, giving businesses everywhere means to determine if a license is Open Source or not.

The Open Source Initiative considers this the next ‘logical step’, and quite important, knowing all the copyright and license legal battles going on nowadays, and how expensive they can be.

Open Source Lead at GitHub, Brandon Keepers offered,

“A canonical, machine-readable source of license metadata is a great step towards enabling developers to build tools around open source licensing and compliance. We can’t wait to see what the community does with it.”

SOURCE: itproportal.com