OT: Opinion, best open source license to use?

Anthony de Boer adb-SACILpcuo74 at public.gmane.org
Tue Sep 6 23:56:48 UTC 2011


Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> I don't know if any of the standard open source licenses require sharing
> anything with the author.  GPL requires sharing with users you give
> binaries to, but no more.

There's apparently a bit of a history of distros not necessarily feeding
patches back upstream, though upstreams being problematic about accepting
them may in some cases have caused people to not bother.

Even within the GPL, there's the question of code ownership.  If you want
to contribute to gcc, for example, they've historically wanted you to
sign a piece of paper actually transferring ownership of your patches to
the FSF.  This enabled them to later relicense under GPLv3, for example. 
By contrast, the Linux kernel didn't do that, and getting innumerable
contributors (or in some cases their legal heirs) who each own their own
bits to agree to a license change now would be basically impossible, so
it's stuck with GPLv2 for better or for worse.

Partly license choice is a matter of goals.  Do you want a widely
understood license?  Do you want to be able to sell commercial copies of
your code later?  Does it bother you if a distro packages your code with
significant changes (see the "iceweasel" saga) from your version, or even
if someone else forks your code?  Do you just want your code to stay out
in public without anyone dragging it back to their cave and going
proprietary with it?

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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