Comment 3 for bug 333932

Note that the license choice is the place where we steer some projects toward our commercial offering. So the "Proprietary/Private..." option has to be there; the single "Other" catch-all isn't enough.

Re (2): Launchpad doesn't have to understand what the licenses mean -- searching is still useful if just the humans understand, or can write their own code that understands (i.e., since we have APIs, it can be useful to record data that Launchpad itself doesn't do much with).

But I think the real issue is automation of project approval. If we have just a generic Other/OSI-Approved option, some percentage of people are going to use it for licenses they made up, or for licenses that aren't actually OSI-approved. Even if we have "Other OSI-Approved: [text field here]", so they could type in the name of the particular license, we'd still have to review it, since every license can be spelled and abbreviated in a myriad different ways. Whereas with a set list, we know that if they checked that radio button, then that's the exact license they meant, and we don't have to spend human time making sure.

By the way, we could handle the "multiple licenses" situation by making them checkboxes instead of radio buttons (if they're not already).