Getting Through the FOSS License Minefield

dotancohen writes "Here's an exercise: Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism. Easy, right? Except for that pesky licensing bit. Our own Shlomi Fish gives an overview of the various options in picking up a licence for one's FOSS project, and tries to give some guidelines choosing one."

Comments

Boiling it Down

[_Sprocket_]

The final paragraph is a pretty good summary of the author's viewpoint:

Finally I'd rather have a proprietary derived work than no derived program at all, or that instead someone will duplicate my effort in creating a BSD-style or a proprietary replacement for my work.

The author doesn't trust regional variations in the treatment of the public domain. The author doesn't really care about Free Software, much less Open Source software. And as such, his opinion is to use a license that enforces the general understanding of the public domain.

Re:Do you even need a license?

[minsk]

Not a lawyer. IMO.

Problem being that without a license, nobody else is permitted to distribute your software. Depending on your and their local laws, they might not be allowed to copy or run it. And if the software causes any damages, you're quite likely liable for them. So, to protect both yourself and the recipient, always specify an explicit license.

The other part is that licenses need not be complicated. The Simplified BSD and MIT licenses are about as trivial as it gets: keep this label, and don't sue me bro. The GNU GPL is much longer, because it's approaching a harder problem: making sure that people who extend your software don't limit their users.

Re:What's the Problem

[IBBoard]

Exactly. I recently changed some of my code from LGPL to Affero GPL because they could be used as a back-end to a web service as well as being the back-end for an app. I'd started with LGPL because I didn't want to force a license on people, but then I changed my mind because the on-going freedom of the code was more important than what license people used. What would be ideal would have been to have had a "LGPL/GPL but allowed to link with anything else as long as it is open source", but since that isn't possible then not letting non-GPLed apps link to my library is the only option. C'est la vie.

I think the article is summed up in one of his later headings: "Why I Prefer the MIT X11 Licence". Basically the whole thing is a "why you should use X11 and anything else is bad" article.

Re:What exactly is "tricky" about said scenario?

[kinnell]

The trouble comes when you're mixing and matching software with different licenses. GPL might seem like the shangri-la of open source licensing, but it's actually very restrictive. This is not to say that it's bad - it's very good for encouraging people to share their code, and preventing abuse of said code by comercial interests, but then you try and embed some other non-gpl code in your project and find yourself in a legal minefield. That's why the LGPL was written - if only the GPL existed, GNU/* would be missing a lot of really good software.