Is it just me, again?

[Mark Wilcox]

Minor OSS licensing note (tell me to shut up if they get dull)...


________________________________
 From: Dr. Hawkins <dochawk at gmail.com>
To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 13 April 2013, 1:48
Subject: Re: Is it just me, again?

<snipped out highly accurate stuff>
> There is a lot of room in the OSS world for a license between the free
> BSD/MIT type licenses, and the viral GPL; something that requires
> disclosure of source code, but that allows mixed license in the
> ultimate program.

There's not a lot of room - everything practical has been covered and the OSI folks that track and approve OSS licenses actively discourage people from writing new ones.

The permissive BSD/MIT style licenses suit one purpose and the strong copyleft licenses like the GPL are at the other end of the spectrum, in between them are weak copyleft licenses, like the LGPL and EPL (Eclipse Public License) - the latter is incompatible with the GPL (due to different stance on patents) but has a very business friendly approach, essentially file-based - e.g. if you publish my code or a modified version you also have to publish the source for that - you can write other code to use with mine in separate files and can keep that private.

If you want to sell software but have a kind of free hobbyist/non-profit version then dual license with strong copyleft is pretty much the only way to go.

If you want to collaborate with others on some common core code that's basically commoditised but build proprietary stuff around/on top of it then weak copyleft is what you want.

If you just want to give your code away (maybe selling services around it) then a permissive license is the way to go.

As yet I'm not aware of anyone coming up with viable OSS business cases that don't fit one of those basic licensing models (except the even stronger AGPL for server side stuff, frankly I think that's trying to stretch copyright way beyond its limits).

-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462

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