Apparently it costs real money to maintain an open source license and keep it up-to-date once a company gets one since case law is a moving target these days.

The GPL is way too viral to appeal to most companies so it's unlikely that the Free Software Foundation's effort to create GPL 2.0 will attract much corporate capital.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the anointer of such things, reportedly recognizes 85 open source licenses, which, if true, is more than the 57 open source licenses it says it recognizes on its Web site. Either way that's more open source licenses than anybody needs.

With these arguing points as a rationale, Computer Associates kicked off a move to bring the industry together to write a commercial open source license that the big companies like HP, IBM and Sun could all agree on and adopt, saving them the cost of maintaining their own.

CA thinks it will take nine months to bring the unnamed license into being.

It expects it to take that long because it means everybody's lawyers basically getting into the same room together and agreeing. (Hmmm. Come to think of it maybe nine months is a conservative estimate.)

Reportedly there have already been some meetings.

It is unclear whether CA has reached out to all 11 companies on its list. CA wouldn't name them, but they presumably include the companies whose open source license are recognized by OSI like Apple, Lucent, Intel, Nokia, RealNetworks, Ricoh and Sybase.

The move could threaten OSI, as well as the GPL, since the new license would reportedly be given to the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to administer.

CA said the name they pick for the common license would have to be "unique, with no connotations." It would also have to be able to stand up in court.

The latest licenses to be blessed by OSI just last week were CA's own Trusted Open Source License, which it uses for Ingres, and Sun's newfangled Common Development and Distribution License, otherwise known as Cuddle, which it intends to use for Open Source Solaris.