Intel, according to the attorney at Intel Corporation responsible for Intel's legal practices and policies relating to open source, has been studying internally the issue of license proliferation.

The attorney, McCoy Smith, says that one step Intel would like to take to reduce license proliferation (both internally, and externally, to Intel) is to have the "Intel Open Source License" (aka "BSD License with Export Notice") removed from future use as an approved OSI open source license.

In a message posted to the OSI license-discuss e-mail list on March 29, Smith wrote:

"It does not appear that the Intel Open Source License has found much use (there approximately 25 projects on SourceForge using the license, most of which appear to have been able to use just the plain BSD license without an export notice) and therefore Intel believes the lntel Open Source License could be removed from the approved list without causing significant problems.

We do however, think that the 'de-approval' of this license should not be retroactive to past uses, since we do not wish to force companies (including Intel) and individuals to have to go through the trouble of re-licensing code they may have released in the past under Intel Open Source License when it was an OSI-approved license. Perhaps a solution would be to categorize this license as 'obsolete for future use' or something like that."

"This may be a new idea that OSI hasn't ever done," Smith added.