Comment 2 for bug 333932

As I understand it, there are three possible reasons for asking for a license at all:

(1) To help discourage registration of things that aren't software-related. This would be catered for just as well by a single-choice menu of half a dozen items than it is by a multi-choice list of twenty-something items (no matter how they're presented).

(2) To let people search for projects matching a particular license, for the purpose of sharing code. It seems unlikely that this would ever be sophisticated enough to be useful, though: Launchpad will never understand, for example, that code licensed under GPLv2-or-later-with-the-font-exception can be used in a project licensed under GPLv3-only but that the reverse isn't true.

(3) To allow recording and presentation of statistics on how license choice is changing over time. This would be fun, but not particularly useful, and you'd probably be more interested in the relative popularity of the common licenses anyway.

If that's an accurate summary, the license selection could be just a single-choice menu, containing only the ~10 most common licenses (as requested by this bug), and ending with the catch-all option "Multiple/Other OSI-Approved".