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FSF On How To Choose a License
ciaran_o_riordan writes "FSF have put together their license recommendations, beyond just their own licenses, for software, documentation, and other works: 'People often ask us what license we recommend they use for their project. We've written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to. The recommendations below are focused on licensing a work that you create — whether that's a modification of an existing work, or a new original work.'"
Notice how they never mentioned once the BSD license, arguably the most free license there is in the world.
The whole premise of this exercise is ridiculous.
I don't believe copyright should exist, but as it does, support GPL-like licenses as a sort of attempt at perversion of the system to ends actually beneficial to society. It would be stupid to give one side all the legal ammunition by just using public domain.
Great Intellect...
In Debian, if you release some documentation using the FDL, and if don't specify that it has no back-cover or invariant part, we'll consider it non-free (eg: it wont go in Debian main, wont be allowed to be put on the CDs, etc.). Yet, the FSF doesn't recognize how bad this license is, and continues to push for this broken one. This is really pure stupidity. People are going to release documentation under this license, thinking that it will render the documentation free, when in fact, it's going to do the exact opposite thing. Why can't the FSF learn and correct this huge mistake? I don't get it...
if they're going to mention things like the Apache license, they should include the BSD license....Whether you agree with it or not, it's a valid license, and should be included in the decision tree for choosing a license.
I mean look at it this way: This is the FSF's cheat-sheet decision tree for people to choose a Free Software license. You could easily compare this document with that page that Creative Commons has to help people choose a Free Culture license.
Now I don't have (read: I'm too lazy to go look up the url right now) the CC page memorized, but last I remembered they only put a few of their CC licenses on there. There wasn't any CC0 listed, and I don't remember the CC-GPL or the Remix license (not sure if that latter license is even being promoted by them anymore).
If the FSF's target is people who don't geek out on the particular nuances of "distribute" vs "convey" in a FOSS license, then they aren't going to give someone a complete primer on all licenses. Remember that this document is designed as a tool for choosing a license, not working with existing licenses. Sure, if I had to educate a bunch of software developers about FOSS licenses I would probably start with the GPL, then move to BSD (3-clause, natch), MIT, Apache, and maybe sprinkle in some cautionary tales about weak or incompatible licenses. But that ain't the game here.
It's obvious why the FSF chose the Apache 2.0 license as their default permissive license
Sure, the new BSD and MIT licenses are shorter, but they don't offer developers and end-users the same kinds of structured protections that are available in the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0. And that's what the FSF is designed to promote.
coding is life
Bullshit. Five FSF licenses and the Apache license does not count for an overview of all the free software licenses out there. They intentionally glossed over the BSD license because it provides more freedom to developers and doesn't require copyright assignment to the FSF, period.
Nonsense. You don't need a copyright assignment to the FSF to license anything under any of the GNU licenses. You only need a copyright assignment if you want your code to become part of an official GNU project, that is, a project maintained by the FSF. Note that this doesn't even include creating a fork of such a project (e.g. making your own modified version of GCC). Only if you want the FSF to distribute your code as part of GNU, you have to assign. Distribute it yourself (or have someone else distribute it who doesn't want the assignment), and there's no need for copyright assignment.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Shock Horror: the FSF is biased on the FSF website in favour of FSF licences ...
In other News: the Pope is Catholic ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
"Please don't use it for software ..., since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL."
A little birdie dumped a codebase on my head recently and one of the many bugfixes I had to do before I could even legally distribute the thing was to rip out some CC-BY-SA code and replace it with something GPL-compatible.
I have no doubt in my mind that whoever chose the CC license for that code wasn't thinking. Or at least not that much. They wanted to open the code? Great. They wanted to copyleft it? Marvelous as well. A copyleft license like the GPL probably would have been fine for them. That's why we need more simplistic documents like the one that the FSF created.
I do have some concerns about the GFDL and the CC licenses for documentation. On the one hand I feel that CC-BY-SA doesn't have some of the legacy non-free baggage mechanisms that you can find in the GFDL. On the other hand I have personally run into problems where documentation for projects includes non-trivial code examples, and the Benton Fraser in me has dutifully tried to get specific permission or dual-licensing on the code examples so that I can use them in a program.
I hope that, just as there has been work to make the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 licenses compatible, we'll see future work to make some of the CC licenses more compatible with permissive and/or copyleft code licenses. Remember that the FSF endorsed that relicensing escape-clause for Wikipedia and some other sites a little while ago, so it seems plausible that there might be some hope for reconciliation and cooperation in the future. At least we can all hope.
coding is life
"Just to be clear, using BSD licensed code in a GPL'ed work is fine - re-licensing the whole file under a more restrictive license is not."
Actually, you're wrong. The BSD license allows anyone to come along and relicense the entire file/program or whatever, under any other license, so long as the conditions of the BSD license are followed. Which mainly come down to attribution.
The same 'freedom" which allows a propitiatory software developer (such as Microsoft) to take BSD licensed stuff and then say that others are not allowed to redistribute without their permission, is the same "freedom" which allows GPL advocates to take the same code and relicense under the GPL. Of course, if the attribution is done correctly there is nothing to stop you from going to the original source of the program and doing what you like.
Oh wait, relicensing BSD stuff is only OK when you can't see the source code for the end result, not when you can see the source code, but can't use it because of that nasty GPL virus! Oh the horror!
Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
Even Creative Commons suggest that their licenses aren't used for code; they simply aren't designed to apply to it well, and Creative Commons don't suggest that you use licenses for situations they'd be inappropriate for. (On the other hand, you can meaningfully GPL an image, but only if the image has some sort of equivalent to source code, which would rather depend on how the image was created; this may be a bad idea for other reasons, though.)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
Here in the US it is not out of the question to be sued for your public domain program. The BSD license has appropriate disclaimers of liability that protect the developer from many kinds of lawsuits. Because a lawsuit is likely to bankrupt you whether you are guilty or not, this is an important consideration.