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.'"

Comments

This Is Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This Is Ridiculous

[maxwell demon]

What is the advantage of the BSD license over the Apache license (which they did mention)?

But it is not ridiculous anyway. It details what they think about how software should be licensed in order to further their goals.
Now your goals may be different to their goals, so the advice doesn't fit your goals. So what? You may not share the goals, but the article isn't about the goals, but how to reach them. It would be ridiculous if the advice obviously did not further their(!) goals. But it is totally irrelevant if they further your goals (except if your goals coincide with theirs). If you don't share their goals, then this article is not for you.

Of course you can argue whether their goals are right. But that's a different topic, unrelated to the question how to reach them.

Re:This Is Ridiculous

[TheRaven64]

What is the advantage of the BSD license over the Apache license (which they did mention)?

Simplicity. OpenBSD rejects Apache 2.0 licensed code from the base system, because the license is so complex that you can't expect developers without legal training to understand it. I've read the Apache 2.0 license a few times, and I'm still not sure I could answer with 100% certainty what I can and can't do with the code.

Perhaps more importantly, the Apache 2.0 license is incompatible with GPLv2 code. This means that you can not mix code under these two licenses in the same codebase. To give a concrete example of when this has been a problem for me, I wanted to index PDFs using code derived from Poppler (derived from xpdf, GPLv2) and Apache Lucene (Apache 2) - this was not possible without jumping through hoops, such as separating the code into two independent programs that could be used together. If either piece of code had been BSDL, then this would have been much easier.

The interaction between the GPL and APSL code here made it harder for me to write Free Software. In the end, I just bumped that project down my to-do list and hacked on BSDL stuff instead.

It would be ridiculous if the advice obviously did not further their(!) goals. But it is totally irrelevant if they further your goals (except if your goals coincide with theirs). If you don't share their goals, then this article is not for you.

TFA purports to be advice. Advice should be telling people how to reach their goals, not yours. If someone's goals don't agree with yours, then the polite thing to do is refuse to give them advice, not give them bad advice.

Re:This Is Ridiculous

[jfrelinger]

Free for developers looking to make closed derivative works. Not free for society, other developers, and certianly not users.

Just because someone makes a closed fork, doesn't mean the original disappears. The original is still there and still free for users, still free for other developers, and society. Your statement is pure copyleft FUD.

If you want it to be "free," just go public domain it. GPL is about actually keeping software free, not providing a toolkit to proprietary developers.

The whole reason the BSD license exists is to explicitly provide protections to the original author that public domain doesn't explicitly provide, like indemnity to lack of fitness, warranty etc.

Re:No BSD

[Qubit]

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

1. It's well written by Real Laywers
2. It offers some patent protection
3. It's GPLv3-compatible

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.

Re:On the topic of choosing a CC license:

[Qubit]

"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.

Re:Wow, that's a broad overview

[no known priors]

"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!

Re:On the topic of choosing a CC license:

[ais523]

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.)