OT: Opinion, best open source license to use?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 07:56:48PM -0400, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> 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.

True, yet another reason lots of people can't be bothered to contribute
to FSF projects.  Too much hassle.

Not that it prevents anyone from taking the code and forking it and
maintaining their own patches and distributing it.  egcs for example.

> 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?

iceweasel makes sense though.  Distributions do NOT want programs to try
and upgrade themselves.  That's what the distribution packaging system is
for, so clearly that crap has to be removed from the code, or at least
disabled as a build option.  And in the case of firefox specifically,
the license does not permit the use of the name or graphics if any of
that is changed, which makes it not qualify as free software (if you
can't change the icons, then you aren't free to modify the program,
so it isn't free software).  So as a result, the icons and name has to
change to make it free software.  Fortunately the source code itself is
free, so it can be done with minimal changes.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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