[extropy-chat] Open Source Licensing - help!

[Hal Finney]

Emlyn writes, regarding open source:

> I was hoping to host it on SourceForge, but found that it's not just a
> matter of getting an account and throwing a project at it. You have to
> know all kinds of difficult detail such as the exact open source
> license conditions that you want to release the code under, detail
> about what the project is, etc etc. It appears that a human moderator
> then assesses your project for worthiness, before it is allowed on
> SourceForge.

I don't think they set the bar too high.  It is more that it takes them a
couple of days to get back to you.  Probably 90% of the approved projects
never go anywhere.  You do have to have a little write-up for it but
if you look at other projects it is usually just a couple of sentences.
This should not be an obstacle for you.

> Firstly, can anyone advise me on the open source licenses? What I'm
> trying to achieve is to put useful code out there (give back to the
> net!), and also to create the beginning of a reputation, or at least
> to find out what it might take. So I'm happy for people to use my code
> for commercial products without paying me any money, but I guess I
> want some kind of acknowledgement.

The "standard" list of open source licenses is at
<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.php>.

> What I'd like is to require users of the library to include some kind
> of acknowledgement in their product, even just in a readme file, or
> maybe show a logo for the library in an about box or something
> similar. I'd like people to be able to use it in closed source,
> commercial projects without the possibility of compromising their IP
> (ie: I don't want to open-source infect them). Just the
> acknowledgement. So far I've looked at GPL (no! too ideology bound,
> and unusable by closed source people), LGPL (still a worry, I think
> closed source people would still steer clear), and BSD (a bit too
> open, I want some form of acknowledgement that the library is being
> used in a product). As for derived works, I guess they need to be
> bound to carry the same license conditions as the original library,
> I'm not clear here.

The old BSD license used to have a requirement that any advertising for
the product include a reference to the University of California.  It was
considered very objectionable and in 1999 the UC officially rescinded
that requirement, so it is no longer operative even for old BSD software.

opensource.org only has the new BSD license without the advertising
clause.  I don't know if any of the other licenses there have one.
You can look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_License to see the
language of the old version if you wanted to use it, as well as some
discussion of the problems it caused.  I don't know whether Sourceforge
includes an old-BSD license as one of their options.

Hal