Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 6, 6:56 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> a... at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> > In article <4BE05D75.7030... at msn.com>,
> > Rouslan Korneychuk  <rousl... 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,

Oh, you mean like Guido and the PSF, and all the Apache people.  Yes,
they're an uncaring bunch.  I wouldn't trust software written by any
of them, or attempt to emulate them in any way.

> then you should choose a copyleft license like the
> GPL.

This is certainly appropriate in some circumstances.  The only time I
personally would use the GPL is if I thought I wrote something so
wonderful and uneasily replicated that I wanted to directly make money
off it, and thus wanted to make it harder for others to take it and
sell enhanced versions without giving me the code back.  For years, I
have viewed the GPL as more of a commercial license than the
permissive ones, a view that has been validated by several high
profile events recently.

> > Unless you have an aggressively Stallmanesque attitude that people
> > using your code should be forced to contribute back any changes
>
> Er, no. Anyone who thinks that a copyleft license “forces” anyone to do
> anything is mistaken about copyright law

Perhaps you feel "forces" is too loaded of a word.  There is no
question, however, that a copyright license can require that if you do
"X" with some code, you must also do "Y".  There is also no question
that the GPL uses this capability in copyright law to require anybody
who distributes a derivative work to provide the source.  Thus,
"forced to contribute back any changes" is definitely what happens
once the decision is made to distribute said changes in object form.

>, or the GPL, or both. The GPL
> only grants permissions, like any other free software license.

But the conditions attached to those permissions make it not at all
"like any other free software license."  And that's true whether we
use the word "forces" or not.

Regards,
Pat