Thoughts on F/OSS (9/10): licenses
This is part of a 10 blog posts series on F/OSS thoughts, extracted from a talk that I gave recently.
That's a topic that I love, since it is so controversial.
The AGPL and GPL licenses are evil. They are way too constraining. However lots of anxious people still use them for pretty much anything they write down, fearing that some evil corporation will make some huge money on top of their work.
A common misconception is that the GPL protects from others making money on top of your work which is stupid, as I can sell services and even copies of your work yet still respect the GPL. The GPL has no provision for money matters, like any other F/OSS license.
BTW why do you need to put under the GPL the number guessing Perl script game that you wrote one night instead of going out? Why do you need to apply the GPL on every single library that you write?
A growing number of projects have a "no GPL" policy on the usage of third party libraries, especially in the Java world.
That being said, the GPL (and even worse, the AGPL) are your weapons of choice if you opt for a dual-licensing strategy.
Fair and liberal licenses are what I urge you to use. If you want some protection on derivative works, opt for a fair license, otherwise go the liberal way.
IzPack used to be GPL (yes, we all make youth mistakes right?). We later changed to the ultra-permissive Apache License version 2.0. Guess what? This move materialized by more external contributions than when we were GPL-licensed.
The GPL was also a strong source of confusion for our users, with the repeated questions: "Under which license is my installer?" and "Do I have to make GPL the tools I distribute with IzPack?".
Some people asked themselves those questions... but fore sure some did not even bother and did not pick IzPack, simply because of the GPL. Think twice before you choose this license!
Related posts:
- Thoughts on F/OSS (3/10): main business models
- Thoughts on F/OSS (10/10): governance
- Thoughts on F/OSS (4/10): steps of your project
- Thoughts on F/OSS (2/10): why making F/OSS?
- Thoughts on F/OSS (1/10): quick facts
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December 28th, 2009 - 13:39
I think you fail to discuss the different needs for different projects.
If you want to make it in a linux distro, there’s nothing like GPL. See OpenJDK.
If you’re writing a library or any software that will be bundled, Apache or LGPL can be appropriate.
If you’re doing standalone software, MPL, CDDL, LGPL, EPL, all sound reasonable.
December 28th, 2009 - 15:10
Thanks Alexis for your point which complements the post. I realized that my post was more a GPL crusade than a discussion on the licenses and their best use cases
I gave this talk in presence of some strong GPL advocates, and I wanted to show that the GPL is too often a bad choice.
I would just add that OpenJDK is not a true GPL project. What I mean here is that it is using a GPL with an exception clause which makes it closer to the LGPL than the GPL. The so-called “linking contamination” clause of the GPL does not apply in OpenJDK thanks to the exception that Sun added (which makes the whole license terms ok BTW).