| Re: Open source policy and the different branches... an overview [message #7171 is a reply to message #7156] |
Tue, 05 August 2008 22:15  |
Johan Messchendorp
Messages: 693
Registered: April 2007
Location: University of Groningen
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first-grade participant |
From: *xs4all.nl
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Hi all,
Some lessons I learned today, reading some open-source documentation.
It concerns which license (GPL, LGPL, BSD, NPL, MPL, X, Apache,...) to use for which case.... let me wrap it up
1) Try to avoid defining your own (open-source) license. It is a crime, either you have all kinds of loopholes or you need a law expert to deal with it.
2) Do we want people to be able to take modifications private or not? If we want to get the source code for modifications back from the people who make them, apply a license that mandates this. Then, GNU Public License, GPL, and its light version, LGPL, would be good choices. If we do not mind that people take modifications private, use something like X or Apache license.
3) Do we want to allow someone to merge your program with their own proprietary software (=any program with a license that doesn't give you as many rights as the GPL)? If so, use the LGPL, which explicitly allows this without allowing people to make modifications to our own code private, or use the X or Apache licenses, which do allow modifications to be kept private.
4) Do we want some people to be able to buy commercial-licensed versions of our program that are not Open Source? If so, dual-license our software.
5) Do we want everyone who uses our program to pay for the privileges? If so, forget about Open Source! But, since, we are using FairROOT, which has/or will have a GPL license, we are bound to an open source license with at least as many rights as GPL.
To conclude: GPL or LGPL? What do you think?
Johan.
[Updated on: Wed, 06 August 2008 00:16] Report message to a moderator |
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