Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 12, 7:26 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 11 Mai, 23:02, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Huh? Permissive licenses offer much better certainty for someone
> > attempting a creative mash-up.  Different versions of the Apache
> > license don't conflict with each other.  If I use an MIT-licensed
> > component, it doesn't attempt to make me offer my whole work under
> > MIT.
>
> What certainty does the MIT licence give contributors to a project
> against patent infringement claims initiated by another contributor?

None.  If I was worried about that, I'd probably use the Apache
license instead.

> > Oh, I get it.  You were discussing the certainty that an author can
> > control what downstream users do with the software to some extent.
> > Yes, I fully agree.  The GPL is for angry idealists who have an easily
> > outraged sense of justice, who don't have enough real problems to work
> > on.
>
> Again, the author does not exercise control when people must
> voluntarily choose to use that author's work and thereby agree to
> adhere to that author's set of terms.

So you're saying that Microsoft doesn't exercise control about keeping
me from using a copy of Windows on more than one machine -- it's not
"control" because I agreed to it up front.   Sorry, my mileage
varies.  In fact, I would (and do) say that Microsoft forces me to buy
one copy of Windows for every machine I want to run it on.

Regards,
Pat