[extropy-chat] Open Source Licensing - help!

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 05:28:00PM +0930, Emlyn wrote:
> The advertising clause looks far too objectionable, I agree. I'd
> actually be happy to use an attribution creative commons license, but
> creative commons seems not to get into the world of source code
> licensing, and source forge list any CC licenses as options; does
> anyone know the story behind this?


* CC licenses don't mention source, open source licenses don't
  mention things like performance rights.  Different targets.
* There are already more than enough open source licenses.
* CC licenses applied to software would be considered a step backward
  (most are more restrictive than any open source license).
* The two CC licenses that are open source/free in spirit (Attribution
  and Attribution-ShareAlike) have some minor issues that render them
  not quite free/open souce -- http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary

The last is being slowly addressed and may be neutralized in some
future version of CC licenses.

Still, a smattering of software projects have used a CC license
anyway.  And there are more and more projects that are both programs
and artistic artificacts, some of which CC licenses may be appropriate
for.

(I work for Creative Commons but the above is unofficial.)

> That's an interesting idea, dual license with GPL and an
> acknowledgement license. I'm leaning toward an Artistic license (like
> Perl?), because I don't want people to have to contact me for
> permission for anything (it tends to mean people go elsewhere). Hmm...

The Artistic license isn't used much outside of Perl in part because
it isn't very clear --
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#ArtisticLicense

Interesting idea though.  Some companies have built businesses on
selling private non-GPL licenses for GPL software, e.g.,
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/commercial-license.html

In either dual licensing case you need to be keep copyright to all
the code or at least ensure all contributors also dual licenses
their contributions, or GPL quickly becomes the only option for
anyone, including you.

If your primary objective is reputation I'd suggest using the most
liberal license possible, e.g., MIT.  Your focus should be on
maximizing use of your code, not legal tricks to ensure attribution
or similar licensing in case someone does happen to use your code.

-- 
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://gondwanaland.com/ml/