Andrew Turner came to town this week. I spoke with him about my peer-to-peer micro-sharing project, among other things.
I asked him what open source license he favored. He said BSD. His was the GPL restricts usage take on GPL. GPL supporters might disagree, or rather, argue that if it is not GPL, the source is not truly open.
I am familiar with the different open source licenses and what they mean. I am familiar with the politics behind GPL and Apache, both are licenses that attempt to exchange a license for a behavior. Apache 2.0 seeks indemnity from patent litigation. GPL seeks indemnity from patent litigation and seeks to perpetuate source distribution.
Thus, I waver between Apache 2.0 and MIT. BSD used to have an advertising clause, saying you must give credit to the author, but that has been dropped, since the advertising clause created a snowball of credits.
I’m not concerned about enforcing billing in credits, however.
Ed Vielmetti says via Twitter “best open source license is the Berkeley license ’share, enjoy, give us credit’ propagates your name best w/fewest entanglements.” Not sure if Andrew and Ed know that the “give us credit” bit has been removed, making the BSD license appear indistinguishable from the MIT license.
If I where not going to choose the MIT license, it is because someone stepped in and asked me to attach the Apache 2.0 license to further the cursade against software patents, and did so without boring me to tears.
8 Responses to “Choosing an Open Source License: The Finer Points of non-GPL Licensing”
It’s a good question, Alan – you saw Peter Honeyman’s pointer to
http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2006/09/01/#gpl-bsd
which argues that the GPL is the best way to go because it enforces a community ownership of the code base, whereas BSD licenses allow commercial forks to create a fork that dies when the founders lose interest, wiping out code with it.
Ed, thank you for sharing, I didn’t notice Peter Honeyman’s pointers in Twitter. This changes my thinking, gets me rethinking. Here’s what I’m rethinking.
Offhand, if I do go with GPL, LGPL or GPL with the classpath exemption, I’m able to reference the advocacy and documentation of FSF. I’m tying my license to a school of thought that actively studies open source software.
Oddly, when David Wheeler goes to make allowances for the successes of BSD style licenses, he references Apache. However, Apache 2.0 is nowhere near as short and sweet as the BSD license. It includes a lot of clauses that grant license to any software patents coming out of, or injected into the code base. This is as much a forced opening as compelling the redistribution of the source.
How about the WTFPL? Sure not for everyone but I don’t care much about my code and the WTPFL is just like that.
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
Thomas
Your suggestion is not much different from MIT (or the current BSD), except that it would probably wrong foot me.
One thing that the license is supposed to do is keep me from having to answer questions about the license. Outlier licenses are going to create more licensing inquiries and not fewer.
That said, if I go GPL, as I am not trending, I’m going to have to answer the question why not Apache 2.0? But, I can put that in a FAQ and give a stock accepted answer.
I guess, I don’t want to explain that I don’t care about my code, but I understand the sentiment when it comes to licensing.
Alan, one catalytic reason that made me fall in love with the BSD license is a mail from Theo de Raadt,
Quote: “We expose no ethic except our own of transitive freedom in sharing. We make no demands except credit.”
Full thread – http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/1123.html
It’s important to note that the Apache License, version 2.0, protects the *user* of the software from patent litigation. The GPL version 2 didn’t, but version 3 does as well.
Ori
It appears to be mutual: The Apache License (v2) – An Overview. It appears to grant license to any patents in the source code. One of the conditions of use is to not start patent litigation against the license issuer.
Good point Alan, thanks!
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