The OSI deserves a round of applause today, as they announced their first approved attribution license. The original draft of CPAL (Common Public Attribution License Version) can be seen here, and was submitted by the folks at SocialText.
What is most important here, is not only that they’ve approved an “Exhibit B” License, but the timing of such an announcement. GPLv3 was recently announced, and for most of us in the SaaS/Web2.0 world, it landed like a great big thud, as it has no provisions for the Google Effect, i.e. Google mods open source code, and doesn’t contribute it back. Since they’re not “distributing” it, the GPLv2/3 doesn’t cover hosted applications as distributions and so they merrily fork away.
The SaaS loophole is essentially plugged with this new license for those that adopt it. Its common sense, but not so common to folks like Eben Moglen at the FSF which recently lashed out at Tim O’Reilly over his criticism of the GPLv3 loophole. Then again, no one ever accused the communists at the FSF of having common sense. 
Congrats to the OSI and SocialText for their hard work. More information here.
