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Open Source License Helper Tool

choosealicense.com

11–20 of 93 posts

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#11
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

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/

[3] https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#12
post #10

May I recommend replacing The Unlicense with CC0? ( 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…

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?

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#13
post #5

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

It's listed in 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 which is the source for the site.)

[deleted]

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#14
post #8

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

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.

WTFPL is not OSI-approved and so briefly held up containerd coming into CNCF.

https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#16

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?

> 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.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#17
post #8

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

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.

IBM's lawyers reportedly asked Poul-Henning Kamp "how much beer?" re: the Beer-ware unlicense[0].

[0]: http://edwards.dk/thesis.pdf (p. 120, 231)

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#20
post #10

May I recommend replacing The Unlicense with CC0? ( 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…

Yes, they selected the relevant license for pretty much all reasonable desired uses except for this one. I really appreciate that they list just MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPLv3 on the front page.

The Unlicense sometimes causes issues with software being accepted into larger collections. CC0 is much more thoroughly drafted, and more widely accepted.

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