Picking a license

[Stephen Hansen]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Ben Finney
<ben+python at benfinney.id.au<ben%2Bpython at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:

> aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
>
> > In article <4BE05D75.7030301 at msn.com>,
> > Rouslan Korneychuk  <rouslank at msn.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >The only question I have now is what about licensing? Is that
> > >something I need to worry about? Should I go with LGPL, MIT, or
> > >something else?
> >
> > Which license you use depends partly on your political philosophy.
>
> Yes.
>
> Unless you place such a low value the freedom of your users that you'd
> allow proprietary derivatives of your work to remove the freedoms you've
> taken care to grant, then you should choose a copyleft license like the
> GPL.


> > Unless you have an aggressively Stallmanesque attitude that people
> > using your code should be forced to contribute back any changes
>

Meh, both of these responses are... tiring and full of political rhetoric
instead of just giving the guy the facts and letting him pick what he wants
and suits himself.

So, to the OP:

If you release the code under the GPL, then anyone is free to take and use
it and do anything in the world they want with it. However, should they
choose to distribute it to anyone else, then any changes they make to it
must be provided to this "anyone else" according to the same terms. So,
someone who takes your code and say, adds a module to it-- that module can't
be in any license but the GPL (or rather, no license more restrictive then
the GPL). Notably, this code can't end up in any closed or proprietary
product.

If you release the code under a "permissive" license, like MIT or the
3-clause BSD, you're basically giving everyone in the world free reign to do
-- anything they want with it, without any sort of "but's". They just can't
say you endorsed it generally, and can't sue you for it, and they can't
claim it was theirs (though they aren't required to admit it was yours,
either). Someone can take it, rename it, and re-release it as a
closed-source program if they want.

Or, someone could incorporate it into any number of projects that are open
source and not GPL-- whereas GPL code can't ever be incorporated into
non-GPL code, without the whole codebase becoming GPL.

Notably, Python has a permissive license, albeit one which is very, very
wordy.

What you decide on is up to you. Me, I'm very strongly in the MIT camp. I
consider what I may release as a sort of donation, and don't expect anything
of anyone-- and don't even mind if someone makes money off of it without
being a good sport. "Freedom" and software have nothing to do with anything
to me. I do open source because I think its an excellent way to get
technically excellent products.

The decision of which camp you find yourself is up to you. :)

(Then there's others, like Artistic, the Apache, and on and on)

--S
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20100506/d0d9f2ae/attachment.html>