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Open Source License Helper Tool

172 points by ethanpil 8y ago

nisabek 8y ago
our team has this link pinned in slack - very useful, normal human language used to explain!
stockkid 8y ago
I have used this tool many times to copy & paste appropriate licenses to my projects. Very helpful.
recluse00 8y ago
No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.
- mlinksva 8y ago
  It's listed in https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ The point of the home page is to make it easy to choose a license, not to list every possible choice. (I occasionally help maintain https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com which is the source for the site.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  It's not an OSI recognized license.
- q3k 8y ago
  Fun fact: at least one large company I worked with explicitly internally documented WTFPL-licensed software as unable to be merged into their codebase, because lawyers. Cf. MIT/BSD/Apache/ISC/CC-BY/CC0 that were all fine.
  - dankohn1 8y ago
    WTFPL is not OSI-approved and so briefly held up containerd coming into CNCF. https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork
    - deathanatos 8y ago
      IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc. If you disagree that the WTFPL is a useable license, how does forking & relicensing work? Changing the license requires having a license that allows you to do so to the new target license (or ownership of the copyright). But if our assumption is that we reject the WTFPL as a valid license, how can we simultaneously use it to relicense? I.e., instead of a needing a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to use the code, it would seem to me you trade that for a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to re-license the code. (At any rate, the upstream relicensed to MIT, and BurntSushi sought agreement from "major contributors, where I interpreted 'major' as '100 lines of code or more.'", so the entire thing appears moot.)
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Yes, clearly you can't change the license of a project you don't have a valid license to.
  - loeg 8y ago
    IBM's lawyers reportedly asked Poul-Henning Kamp "how much beer?" re: the Beer-ware unlicense[0]. [0]: http://edwards.dk/thesis.pdf http://edwards.dk/thesis.pdf (p. 120, 231)
  - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
    Some of us rather like that unintended consequence of the WTFPL.
  - rmc 8y ago
    Include Google: https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#banned https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#bann...
- vortico 8y ago
  That may or may not hold up in court. Best to not use it if you actually want to release all copyrights.
  - loeg 8y ago
    This is potentially a concern for software licensees, but not the author of the work.
    - vortico 8y ago
      Absolutely true, but the reason someone licenses their software under an open source license at all is because they want it to be open source. Some developers may erraneously think this is a good open source license, when in fact it might not have the effect they intended.
niftich 8y ago
This is the same one built into GitHub's onboarding flow. It greatly aids understanding by laypeople, and goes a long way towards bridging the awkward divide between making one's labor permissively available, and navigating the very specialized field of intellectual property rights. I do wish the drilldown for placing software into the public domain would suggest CC0 over the Unlicense. CC0 is more precise, is backed by both a foundation and large organizations, and pre-dates it by several years.
vortico 8y ago
May I recommend replacing The Unlicense with CC0? (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). It has all the same bullet points except is a bit tighter in countries where a public domain release is not legally valid. Unfortunately it is more difficult to release works into the public domain than The Unlicense addresses. The Unlicense is likely sufficient for all foreseen cases in countries except Germany and France (to my knowledge), but CC0 is written beautifully with a double-fallback to completely waiver all rights in all jurisdictions. Here are some analyses: - https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/ https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-... Why this is okay to use for software. - https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kreuzer.pdf https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kre... concludes that it is sufficient in German law. - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain It is recommended by the FSF as a prefered method for releasing source code into the public domain.
- ta76567656 8y ago
  I find it so strange that this is a problem... like the top legal minds of Germany can't figure out how to interpret the concept of public domain from another jurisdiction in a way that's consistent with German law? They can't just make a ruling that says, "OK, everyone consider public domain from other jurisdictions to be the most permissive possible license under German law" and be done with it?
  - vortico 8y ago
    Germany and France are not necessarily the cause of something like CC0, because even if all countries honored public domain as an alternative to copyright law, it's a concept that lives in a different legal dimension. Declaring that a work is in the public domain doesn't remove copyright---it assigns a different legal code to your work. Using CC0 does remove copyright, through its fantastic double-fallback causes (2) and (3), so only one legal system needs to be assumed for CC0 to work: copyright (which conveniently most countries follow since the Berne Convention.)
benatkin 8y ago
There's a disturbing trend that's similar to Microsoft's Shared Source [1] initiative from last decade, used by GitLab Enterprise [2] and Greensock [3]. The code is available for anyone to download, but is not under an Open Source license. They have the option of accusing their competitors of looking at their source code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ [3] https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I'd rather this over proprietary software that you simply cannot verify what it does, to be fair. There's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary licensing, IMHO, so being able to be clear about what's in it is nice. That accusation is possible even with code that's been decompiled, so it's not really any different: A legal claim still requires some sort of proof.
- ternaryoperator 8y ago
  It's useful to note that the term "open source" does not require an OSI-approved license. It is conventional that the term implies an OSI license, but there are projects that are undeniably open source which are not issued under an OSI license. SQLite being one of the most prominent ones. All that can be said today formally about a project is whether or not it's OSI-licensed, rather than whether it's open source. So companies such as GitLab can claim they are "open source" legitimately without using an OSI license--as can SQLite. Edit: clarity
  - benatkin 8y ago
    Only because it isn't trademarked. Anyone who has the slightest shred of respect for open source community uses the term properly. They coined the term. As for SQLite, it's compatible with OSI licenses. It has been folded into a larger work that's licensed under an OSI approved license countless times. There are some projects that might throw around the term public domain but I'd have to examine the details to see if it's ready to be used as part of an open source project.
JetSpiegel 8y ago
Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? The introduce the "I don't care about sharing improvements" option for BSD style licenses?
- loeg 8y ago
  > Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? Have you looked at the text of either of these licenses? (Or the MIT license? The linked page mentions the MIT license, but never any BSD license.) If you take a brief glance at both texts, the question immediately answers itself.
- IAmLiterallyAB 8y ago
  The GPL isn't simple at all. It restricts how your code can be relicensed and requires care in deciding to choose it. MIT is about as simple as it gets.
- stephenr 8y ago
  How is more requirements the “simple” choice?
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  The GPL is anything but "nice and simple". There's a reason why it's such a huge wall of text, compared to the much shorter BSD and MIT licenses. And FSF's preferred interpretations of the GPL, and various ambiguous things in it (especially with respect to dynamic linking and implementations of standard interfaces) make it even less "nice and simple". Let's take an example: Django is a web framework that, among its components, includes an ORM. The ORM is mostly agnostic when it comes to what database you use (I say "mostly" because the core team has always had a preference for PostgreSQL, so there are some bundled things that either only work with PostgreSQL or become more featureful if you choose to use PostgreSQL); it comes with built-in backends that speak the SQL dialects of PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL and SQLite. There are third-party backends available that speak the SQL dialects of other databases. To actually use it, you have to pair it with a DB driver module implementing PEP 249, the standard Python database API. A SQLite driver ships in Python's standard library; drivers for PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL are available third party. Django's bundled MySQL backend expects to talk to a MySQL Python driver module. All currently-available Python driver modules for MySQL are GPL'd. Does the fact that the backend module for MySQL attempts to load a MySQL driver mean Django has to be GPL'd? Django and the driver will be sharing address space, after all, and FSF uses that as a clear indication of a "combined work" that must be GPL'd. Now, the usual way around this is to point out that Django simply wants something implementing a standard API, and doesn't know in advance which implementation you'll choose to actually use; if you had some other library implementing the same standard API, it would work just as well as the GPL'd implementation. This has worked out in other domains to avoid accidentally GPL'ing things that just want to use a standard API implemented by multiple competing libraries. But... the standard Python database API doesn't quite cover everything you might need to implement full-featured database access, especially when it comes to interrogating the version and supported features of the actual database you're talking to. Luckily these things can almost all be found out through DB-specific queries, but if Django has to hit a non-standardized bit of the driver's API to get some of that information, and if the driver is GPL'd, does that require Django to be GPL'd? And everything everyone's ever developed using Django? As far as I can tell, the only thing used by Django's MySQL backend that isn't standardized in PEP 249 is a set of constants that label MySQL's internal column-type identifiers to allow introspection (i.e., so you can query for a table's column list and figure out that column type 7 is a TIMESTAMP, or column type 252 is a BLOB). Is that enough to GPL the entire Django ecosystem? What if FSF decides tomorrow that it is, and comes after us? What if we just copy/paste the integer values over into a file in Django? Does that list of constants even meet the requirements for copyright protection in the first place? There is nothing "nice" or "simple" about having to navigate this. It's only "nice" if your definition of the term includes deliberately inflicting pain on people who are developing software that meets the FSF's definition of Free but which does not happen to be distributed under the FSF's preferred license. Personally I don't find that to be "nice" at all.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nimbius 8y ago
Some of these licenses are like kryptonite for enterprises. For example, I once wrote an ip address manager in python and licensed it AGPLv3. Two companies reached out to me through Github not to talk about features or bugs, but to demand I change the license to BSD. after a dozen or so random bug reports insisting I had no right to use AGPL, AGPL was not a real license, and even a handful of Outlook meeting invites copied and pasted to me for a face-to-face negotiation of new licensing terms, I eventually deleted the repo.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Sounds like the license did its job quite nicely. If those companies cared enough to negotiate new license terms, they could pay you for such a license.
  - Avamander 8y ago
    It's not only companies who ask for license changes, Google and other employees ask licences to be changes too simply because the corporation they work for forbids even looking at the source otherwise. For example: https://github.com/pebble-dev/rebblestore-api/pull/31 https://github.com/pebble-dev/rebblestore-api/pull/31
    - teddyh 8y ago
      In my view, that’s more an unexpected feature. I can give people freedom to do what they need to do with the software I write, at the same time as I can, in effect, prevent Google from even reading it? Sign me up!
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      That is what the commenter claims, but the link provided for support refers only to submitting patches that cover work Google owns. I found nothing about a prohibition on reading code, not a prohibition on using those licenses for personal projects.
    - DannyBee 8y ago
wglass 8y ago
Good comments on each license, but misses a major point about sharing and community. Despite the rhetoric about "freedom" the GPL is a huge disincentive for developers to participate. A larger code base that contains a GPL component must also be GPL. This is a nonstarter for most business users. If you want to encourage a variety of developers to adopt, modify, and share changes, you are much better off with a permissive license such as MIT or Apache. Paradoxically, the fact that you aren't forcing developers to share changes to the code encourages more use and makes it more likely you'll get a community contributing to the project. Good examples of open source projects with diverse developer communities and permissive licenses include Hadoop, Apache webserver, Tomcat, NPM, Kubernates, TensorFlow and many more. If you want to keep tight control over the code base and dictate all future changes, choose GPL. This was the choice for the JDK, MySQL, and many other projects controlled by corporate entities with little outside contribution. (Yes, Gnu/Linux is a major exception as a GPL licensed ecosystem with diverse contributor base. But it's the exception rather than the rule).
- abritinthebay 8y ago
  Which is why the LGPL exists. Most code that is designed to be shared & incorporated rather than complete/forked should likely be LGPL (if the GPL ideals are what is wanted). Personally I just go with MIT/X11 but there are good reasons to want to use a GPL-type license
  - wglass 8y ago
    Yes. But the LGPL is still more restrictive as it requires you to share your changes. Not as much of a disincentive but it still discourages community. There are two good reasons to go with a gpl or lgpl license. One is ideological. You believe software should be free and that downstream developers must conform to your ideals. This is the Richard Stallman approach. The second is control. You actively want to discourage forking and outside contributions. This is Oracle’s approach. This isn’t necessarily bad or evil, but it’s pragmatic. Generally a corporation doing this will offer the license under a separate paid offering as well. I can’t think of any other good reasons to choose GPL.
ethanpil 8y ago
I would love to see a filter here, so I can pick and choose the attributes of a license that are important to me, and see which ones from the full list might be a good fit.
callekabo 8y ago
I prefer copyfree licenses http://copyfree.org/ http://copyfree.org/ and usually release stuff under the Copyfree Open Innovation License (COIL) http://coil.apotheon.org/ http://coil.apotheon.org/
- SeanLuke 8y ago
  I read that entire front webpage and still have no idea what a copyfree license is.
oaiey 8y ago
I used this page for years as a recommendation to people asking about licensing. It explains in simple checks many details and is very helpful. However, I think especially license interpretation (like how to integrate GPL the right way or how to apply license summaries the right way or copyright statements in source headers) do deserve a far more extensive page.
caniszczyk 8y ago
I also recommend TLDRLegal: https://tldrlegal.com https://tldrlegal.com
- overcast 8y ago
  Dang. Now THAT is a helpful resource. Thank you for pointing me to this.
teddyh 8y ago
Note that this page is owned by GitHub. Will Microsoft change this page? Will they maybe merely stop linking to it? Who knows.
teddyh 8y ago
As an alternative, please see the Free Software Foundation’s license recommendations guide: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations
SeanLuke 8y ago
MIT/X11 come from a kindler, gentler era, and so lack a patent release, which is a huge flaw nowadays. Is there any legitimate reason one would select MIT/X11 over Apache?
- mlinksva 8y ago
  One or more of: one might prefer MIT's simplicity (both the text itself, and the what's needed to comply) relative to Apache-2.0, one might not like the specifics of the latter's patent terms, one might consider the former's arguable implicit patent license good enough https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license
captainbland 8y ago
Needs more peer production license. http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License c. You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if: i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners
- rectang 8y ago
  That's a field of use restriction, and thus incompatible with the open source definition curated by OSI.
  - captainbland 8y ago
    As true as it is, I don't believe their definition is necessarily what is best for software or for developers. I don't believe that it is just that ownership of a product or its copyright, even in an open source capacity, should be transferred from developer to business owner if they're separate people. Overly permissive licenses encourage private business to take advantage of software commons without necessarily contributing any of their changes back to it, which alienates their own developers from the changes at the moment and while at the moment it is trendy for companies to create software under these licenses, there's no mechanism to guarantee future updates will also be released in such a permissive way.

172 points by ethanpil 8y ago

nisabek 8y ago

our team has this link pinned in slack - very useful, normal human language used to explain!

stockkid 8y ago

I have used this tool many times to copy & paste appropriate licenses to my projects. Very helpful.

recluse00 8y ago

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

mlinksva 8y ago
It's listed in https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ The point of the home page is to make it easy to choose a license, not to list every possible choice. (I occasionally help maintain https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com which is the source for the site.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
WorldMaker 8y ago
It's not an OSI recognized license.
q3k 8y ago
Fun fact: at least one large company I worked with explicitly internally documented WTFPL-licensed software as unable to be merged into their codebase, because lawyers. Cf. MIT/BSD/Apache/ISC/CC-BY/CC0 that were all fine.
- dankohn1 8y ago
  WTFPL is not OSI-approved and so briefly held up containerd coming into CNCF. https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc. If you disagree that the WTFPL is a useable license, how does forking & relicensing work? Changing the license requires having a license that allows you to do so to the new target license (or ownership of the copyright). But if our assumption is that we reject the WTFPL as a valid license, how can we simultaneously use it to relicense? I.e., instead of a needing a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to use the code, it would seem to me you trade that for a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to re-license the code. (At any rate, the upstream relicensed to MIT, and BurntSushi sought agreement from "major contributors, where I interpreted 'major' as '100 lines of code or more.'", so the entire thing appears moot.)
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Yes, clearly you can't change the license of a project you don't have a valid license to.
- loeg 8y ago
  IBM's lawyers reportedly asked Poul-Henning Kamp "how much beer?" re: the Beer-ware unlicense[0]. [0]: http://edwards.dk/thesis.pdf http://edwards.dk/thesis.pdf (p. 120, 231)
- Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
  Some of us rather like that unintended consequence of the WTFPL.
- rmc 8y ago
  Include Google: https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#banned https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#bann...
vortico 8y ago
That may or may not hold up in court. Best to not use it if you actually want to release all copyrights.
- loeg 8y ago
  This is potentially a concern for software licensees, but not the author of the work.
  - vortico 8y ago
    Absolutely true, but the reason someone licenses their software under an open source license at all is because they want it to be open source. Some developers may erraneously think this is a good open source license, when in fact it might not have the effect they intended.

niftich 8y ago

This is the same one built into GitHub's onboarding flow. It greatly aids understanding by laypeople, and goes a long way towards bridging the awkward divide between making one's labor permissively available, and navigating the very specialized field of intellectual property rights. I do wish the drilldown for placing software into the public domain would suggest CC0 over the Unlicense. CC0 is more precise, is backed by both a foundation and large organizations, and pre-dates it by several years.

vortico 8y ago

May I recommend replacing The Unlicense with CC0? (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). It has all the same bullet points except is a bit tighter in countries where a public domain release is not legally valid. Unfortunately it is more difficult to release works into the public domain than The Unlicense addresses. The Unlicense is likely sufficient for all foreseen cases in countries except Germany and France (to my knowledge), but CC0 is written beautifully with a double-fallback to completely waiver all rights in all jurisdictions. Here are some analyses: - https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/ https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-... Why this is okay to use for software. - https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kreuzer.pdf https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kre... concludes that it is sufficient in German law. - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain It is recommended by the FSF as a prefered method for releasing source code into the public domain.

ta76567656 8y ago
I find it so strange that this is a problem... like the top legal minds of Germany can't figure out how to interpret the concept of public domain from another jurisdiction in a way that's consistent with German law? They can't just make a ruling that says, "OK, everyone consider public domain from other jurisdictions to be the most permissive possible license under German law" and be done with it?
- vortico 8y ago
  Germany and France are not necessarily the cause of something like CC0, because even if all countries honored public domain as an alternative to copyright law, it's a concept that lives in a different legal dimension. Declaring that a work is in the public domain doesn't remove copyright---it assigns a different legal code to your work. Using CC0 does remove copyright, through its fantastic double-fallback causes (2) and (3), so only one legal system needs to be assumed for CC0 to work: copyright (which conveniently most countries follow since the Berne Convention.)

benatkin 8y ago

There's a disturbing trend that's similar to Microsoft's Shared Source [1] initiative from last decade, used by GitLab Enterprise [2] and Greensock [3]. The code is available for anyone to download, but is not under an Open Source license. They have the option of accusing their competitors of looking at their source code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ [3] https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I'd rather this over proprietary software that you simply cannot verify what it does, to be fair. There's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary licensing, IMHO, so being able to be clear about what's in it is nice. That accusation is possible even with code that's been decompiled, so it's not really any different: A legal claim still requires some sort of proof.
ternaryoperator 8y ago
It's useful to note that the term "open source" does not require an OSI-approved license. It is conventional that the term implies an OSI license, but there are projects that are undeniably open source which are not issued under an OSI license. SQLite being one of the most prominent ones. All that can be said today formally about a project is whether or not it's OSI-licensed, rather than whether it's open source. So companies such as GitLab can claim they are "open source" legitimately without using an OSI license--as can SQLite. Edit: clarity
- benatkin 8y ago
  Only because it isn't trademarked. Anyone who has the slightest shred of respect for open source community uses the term properly. They coined the term. As for SQLite, it's compatible with OSI licenses. It has been folded into a larger work that's licensed under an OSI approved license countless times. There are some projects that might throw around the term public domain but I'd have to examine the details to see if it's ready to be used as part of an open source project.

JetSpiegel 8y ago

Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? The introduce the "I don't care about sharing improvements" option for BSD style licenses?

loeg 8y ago
> Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? Have you looked at the text of either of these licenses? (Or the MIT license? The linked page mentions the MIT license, but never any BSD license.) If you take a brief glance at both texts, the question immediately answers itself.
IAmLiterallyAB 8y ago
The GPL isn't simple at all. It restricts how your code can be relicensed and requires care in deciding to choose it. MIT is about as simple as it gets.
stephenr 8y ago
How is more requirements the “simple” choice?
ubernostrum 8y ago
The GPL is anything but "nice and simple". There's a reason why it's such a huge wall of text, compared to the much shorter BSD and MIT licenses. And FSF's preferred interpretations of the GPL, and various ambiguous things in it (especially with respect to dynamic linking and implementations of standard interfaces) make it even less "nice and simple". Let's take an example: Django is a web framework that, among its components, includes an ORM. The ORM is mostly agnostic when it comes to what database you use (I say "mostly" because the core team has always had a preference for PostgreSQL, so there are some bundled things that either only work with PostgreSQL or become more featureful if you choose to use PostgreSQL); it comes with built-in backends that speak the SQL dialects of PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL and SQLite. There are third-party backends available that speak the SQL dialects of other databases. To actually use it, you have to pair it with a DB driver module implementing PEP 249, the standard Python database API. A SQLite driver ships in Python's standard library; drivers for PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL are available third party. Django's bundled MySQL backend expects to talk to a MySQL Python driver module. All currently-available Python driver modules for MySQL are GPL'd. Does the fact that the backend module for MySQL attempts to load a MySQL driver mean Django has to be GPL'd? Django and the driver will be sharing address space, after all, and FSF uses that as a clear indication of a "combined work" that must be GPL'd. Now, the usual way around this is to point out that Django simply wants something implementing a standard API, and doesn't know in advance which implementation you'll choose to actually use; if you had some other library implementing the same standard API, it would work just as well as the GPL'd implementation. This has worked out in other domains to avoid accidentally GPL'ing things that just want to use a standard API implemented by multiple competing libraries. But... the standard Python database API doesn't quite cover everything you might need to implement full-featured database access, especially when it comes to interrogating the version and supported features of the actual database you're talking to. Luckily these things can almost all be found out through DB-specific queries, but if Django has to hit a non-standardized bit of the driver's API to get some of that information, and if the driver is GPL'd, does that require Django to be GPL'd? And everything everyone's ever developed using Django? As far as I can tell, the only thing used by Django's MySQL backend that isn't standardized in PEP 249 is a set of constants that label MySQL's internal column-type identifiers to allow introspection (i.e., so you can query for a table's column list and figure out that column type 7 is a TIMESTAMP, or column type 252 is a BLOB). Is that enough to GPL the entire Django ecosystem? What if FSF decides tomorrow that it is, and comes after us? What if we just copy/paste the integer values over into a file in Django? Does that list of constants even meet the requirements for copyright protection in the first place? There is nothing "nice" or "simple" about having to navigate this. It's only "nice" if your definition of the term includes deliberately inflicting pain on people who are developing software that meets the FSF's definition of Free but which does not happen to be distributed under the FSF's preferred license. Personally I don't find that to be "nice" at all.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nimbius 8y ago

Some of these licenses are like kryptonite for enterprises. For example, I once wrote an ip address manager in python and licensed it AGPLv3. Two companies reached out to me through Github not to talk about features or bugs, but to demand I change the license to BSD. after a dozen or so random bug reports insisting I had no right to use AGPL, AGPL was not a real license, and even a handful of Outlook meeting invites copied and pasted to me for a face-to-face negotiation of new licensing terms, I eventually deleted the repo.

JoshTriplett 8y ago
Sounds like the license did its job quite nicely. If those companies cared enough to negotiate new license terms, they could pay you for such a license.
- Avamander 8y ago
  It's not only companies who ask for license changes, Google and other employees ask licences to be changes too simply because the corporation they work for forbids even looking at the source otherwise. For example: https://github.com/pebble-dev/rebblestore-api/pull/31 https://github.com/pebble-dev/rebblestore-api/pull/31
  - teddyh 8y ago
    In my view, that’s more an unexpected feature. I can give people freedom to do what they need to do with the software I write, at the same time as I can, in effect, prevent Google from even reading it? Sign me up!
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    That is what the commenter claims, but the link provided for support refers only to submitting patches that cover work Google owns. I found nothing about a prohibition on reading code, not a prohibition on using those licenses for personal projects.
  - DannyBee 8y ago

wglass 8y ago

Good comments on each license, but misses a major point about sharing and community. Despite the rhetoric about "freedom" the GPL is a huge disincentive for developers to participate. A larger code base that contains a GPL component must also be GPL. This is a nonstarter for most business users. If you want to encourage a variety of developers to adopt, modify, and share changes, you are much better off with a permissive license such as MIT or Apache. Paradoxically, the fact that you aren't forcing developers to share changes to the code encourages more use and makes it more likely you'll get a community contributing to the project. Good examples of open source projects with diverse developer communities and permissive licenses include Hadoop, Apache webserver, Tomcat, NPM, Kubernates, TensorFlow and many more. If you want to keep tight control over the code base and dictate all future changes, choose GPL. This was the choice for the JDK, MySQL, and many other projects controlled by corporate entities with little outside contribution. (Yes, Gnu/Linux is a major exception as a GPL licensed ecosystem with diverse contributor base. But it's the exception rather than the rule).

abritinthebay 8y ago
Which is why the LGPL exists. Most code that is designed to be shared & incorporated rather than complete/forked should likely be LGPL (if the GPL ideals are what is wanted). Personally I just go with MIT/X11 but there are good reasons to want to use a GPL-type license
- wglass 8y ago
  Yes. But the LGPL is still more restrictive as it requires you to share your changes. Not as much of a disincentive but it still discourages community. There are two good reasons to go with a gpl or lgpl license. One is ideological. You believe software should be free and that downstream developers must conform to your ideals. This is the Richard Stallman approach. The second is control. You actively want to discourage forking and outside contributions. This is Oracle’s approach. This isn’t necessarily bad or evil, but it’s pragmatic. Generally a corporation doing this will offer the license under a separate paid offering as well. I can’t think of any other good reasons to choose GPL.

ethanpil 8y ago

I would love to see a filter here, so I can pick and choose the attributes of a license that are important to me, and see which ones from the full list might be a good fit.

callekabo 8y ago

I prefer copyfree licenses http://copyfree.org/ http://copyfree.org/ and usually release stuff under the Copyfree Open Innovation License (COIL) http://coil.apotheon.org/ http://coil.apotheon.org/

SeanLuke 8y ago
I read that entire front webpage and still have no idea what a copyfree license is.

oaiey 8y ago

I used this page for years as a recommendation to people asking about licensing. It explains in simple checks many details and is very helpful. However, I think especially license interpretation (like how to integrate GPL the right way or how to apply license summaries the right way or copyright statements in source headers) do deserve a far more extensive page.

caniszczyk 8y ago

I also recommend TLDRLegal: https://tldrlegal.com https://tldrlegal.com

overcast 8y ago
Dang. Now THAT is a helpful resource. Thank you for pointing me to this.

teddyh 8y ago

Note that this page is owned by GitHub. Will Microsoft change this page? Will they maybe merely stop linking to it? Who knows.

teddyh 8y ago

As an alternative, please see the Free Software Foundation’s license recommendations guide: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations

SeanLuke 8y ago

MIT/X11 come from a kindler, gentler era, and so lack a patent release, which is a huge flaw nowadays. Is there any legitimate reason one would select MIT/X11 over Apache?

mlinksva 8y ago
One or more of: one might prefer MIT's simplicity (both the text itself, and the what's needed to comply) relative to Apache-2.0, one might not like the specifics of the latter's patent terms, one might consider the former's arguable implicit patent license good enough https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license

captainbland 8y ago

Needs more peer production license. http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License c. You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if: i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners

rectang 8y ago
That's a field of use restriction, and thus incompatible with the open source definition curated by OSI.
- captainbland 8y ago
  As true as it is, I don't believe their definition is necessarily what is best for software or for developers. I don't believe that it is just that ownership of a product or its copyright, even in an open source capacity, should be transferred from developer to business owner if they're separate people. Overly permissive licenses encourage private business to take advantage of software commons without necessarily contributing any of their changes back to it, which alienates their own developers from the changes at the moment and while at the moment it is trendy for companies to create software under these licenses, there's no mechanism to guarantee future updates will also be released in such a permissive way.