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An Open Source License for Education?
Erno_Rubaiyat asks: "The educational foundation that I work for is preparing to release some software. We are committed to releasing it with an Open Source license, but are unsure what license to use. I was curious if anyone had considered or compared the Sakai license to the Creative Commons licenses? I like the Sakai license because it is so simple, but does it leave any obvious areas open for abuse? As a side note: we are including several packages that are licensed under the LGPL and the GPL. Are there any pitfalls that we should be aware of while licensing our 'original' work with a different license than these components?"
The GPL and BSD licenses are the most well understood licenses out there, and hence when someone else is considering using your code, they'll know right away what to expect.
Other less well-known licenses like Sakai should be left to organizations that have a legal department to make those decisions for them. The last thing you probably want is someone who might join in your software community and contribute useful changes back to you to be scared off by an unfamiliar license.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
The parent is a troll.
> > We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
>the FSF ends up being the ones defending violations in court. You give your software to them, and they use their power of copyright to defend it.
Incorrect, the "We" refers to the person licensing the software under the GPL.
Note how the copyright owner is explicitly named. Also note that Linux falls only under version 2 of the GPL. Many software projects state that they use the GPLv2 or any later version (there is no later version at the moment). There's nothing preventing the FSF from stating that the GPLv3 requires that only GPL software run on a computer where any GPL software runs, or that GPL software can only be used with the HURD. The HURD doesn't have to conquer Linux; it will start out with a full toolchain and many programs to go with it. Under the GPLv3, the FSF could deny the use of those programs under Linux. Suddently the big players in the OS market are Microsoft, the BSDs, and the HURD.
Wrong, the full text in question actually reads: "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
Thus if the FSF were to publish a more restrictive GPL v3, Linux and everything else originally licensed under v2 would remain available under the terms of v2.
> The best thing to do is to roll your own license, using either the BSD or GPL as a basis (depending on which you prefer).
No, do not roll your own. This would only promote confusing. BSD and the GPL are accepted and well-recognized standards. Use them!
The unofficial
NO! NO! WRONG!
I'm sorry, but you're not doing anybody any favours here. You're making a huge, fundamental mistake that's just going to mislead people. This mistake is made over and over again and is the OSS community's biggest problem...
You see, none of these license say anything about how you can use the software. The GPL even explicitly states this. They are concerned solely with how you may redistribute changed copies of the software.
Here's the corrected version, to the best of my knowledge:
The corrolory to the above is: if you don't distribute your changes, the licenses are irrelevant, because their redistribution licenses, not user licenses. (This is why it's incorrect to use the GPL as an EULA.)
I don't know enough about the LGPL to comment; I believe that it's similar to the GPL, but has a much laxer definition of what constitutes a changed copy of the software.
Please, this is important. It's worth your while to try and get it right!