Comments on: Solving the 5256 problem

By: elliottcable

elliottcable — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:05:23 +0000

I disagree, personally. I’m going to be working with a lawyer friend soon-ish to put together yet another license, however, this one has different goals, so I don’t know if it’d even make your goal of open source licenses. Hopefully I won’t be adding a further 74 to your total!

By: Garrett Albright

Garrett Albright — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:21:40 +0000

I like Antoine’s idea. Rid the world of phony “open source with an asterisk” copyleft licenses!

By: Matthieu

Matthieu — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:36:09 +0000

I’d replace LGPL with MPL. The definition of linking is far too imprecise. MPL is much clearer and even if it’s slightly less viral, it has a good code-sharing kick. I haven’t much love for MIT either, it’s too short and there are no patent termination clauses.

By the way even when we’re all open source developers, hippie-like and free love there are some dangers in combining incompatible license. It’s the main reason of existence for many big foundations (Apache, Mozilla, Linux, …). When your project becomes popular, you won’t be able to escape private interests. Then all bets are off. I know of at least one careless guy who’s been sued, he didn’t enjoy the experience.

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:45:34 +0000

Before we ship CommitChat, which I think is the first distributable commercial thing I’ve made in years, I will go back and double check the licenses of libraries we use. I think most just ask “Please give attribution”. But, I’ll double check. Thanks for the reminder/warning.

By: Assaf

Assaf — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:21:10 +0000

I know a lot of open source developers operate under the Friends & Family License Agreement. They don’t really read, understand or obey the license, but it works because we’re all one big family of open source developers, and you’re not going to sue people with good intents.

Business has different exposure. A mixture can be toxic in that it’s illegal to distribute the code under either license, and so now you have software you can’t ship, hardware you can’t ship, a core piece of infrastructure you have to decommission, etc. As a business you need to pay close attention to the licenses you use and how they mix together.

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:32:29 +0000

Hmm, I guess I’ve never read the MIT license either. I probably don’t read the “ToS” rules on each website I subscribe to either. I hope I don’t get sued by an unhappy user one day.

Actually, what is the consequence of mixing/merging licenses? Should I worry/care?

By: Antoine Toulme

Antoine Toulme — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:18:00 +0000

I think the MIT license, the BSD license, and the wtfpl license should merge.

If they could go by the terms of the wtfpl, that’s be great.

By: Assaf

Assaf — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:41:48 +0000

Have you looked at the Ruby license, which covers the core/standard libraries?

What about deploying the code on JRuby?

When you’re using OpenSSL or Libxml or Syck or Cocoa through a Ruby library, which license is actually in effect?

You might not be aware of the mess, but legally it’s still there. And it’s a big problem giving a clean bill of health to even the most trivial of scripts.

By: Dr Nic

Dr Nic — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:33:51 +0000

I think I’m fortunate that most of the libraries I want to use or chop up and reuse are MIT license or another version of “do what you want with it”. Fortunately this is the common license for most/all Ruby libraries/gems/plugins.

To date, I don’t think any of my libraries have a dependency on a GPL-like license. I avoid them.

So I think I have 1 license combination in my life.