The Dangers Of A Post-License Era

You don't see many discussions about free software licenses any more. Once a burning issue, licenses and their implications hardly seem to be mentioned these days. Increasingly, we seem to be moving into a post-license era, and the implications for free and open source software are potentially troubling.
 
The reasons for this apparent shift of interest aren't hard to find. To start with, most of the important license issues have already been resolved.  It's hard to imagine any licensing issue today that would be as significant to the community at large as the release of the OpenOffice.org code in 2000, or of the discussion of the third version of the GPL in 2005-07.

Yes, the occasional licensing stories do occur. But today's license story tends to be routine, and not to affect everyday users. For instnace while I'm sure that the adoption of The Apache License was important news to those involved with Apache OpenOffice, to every day users, it mattered very little -- especially since they were more likely to be using LibreOffice.