open source software licensing

open source software licensing

Written By BinaryMoon on Mar. 19, 2008.

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Does anyone else get confused by all of the open source software licenses?

I want to release some code on google code but have no idea what license to use. They're all too technical for me so I was wondering if someone could help.

I want a license that will allow people to use the code as they wish in free/ commercial software. However they have to credit the source, and they have to release any changes under the same license so that they can be added to the core.

Oli

Written Mar. 19, 2008 / Report /

Sounds like you need GPL but that doesn't explicitly account for attribution (I think they would be fine scraping out all your notices as long as the result was under the GPL).

The Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike might do you well. Generally CC licenses are seen as a softer option and they're thoroughly less popular than GPL-style but it does account specifically for your requirements.

Ozone42

Written Mar. 19, 2008 / Report /

A lot of the big corporations have entire divisions of their legal departments to sift through the mess that is GPL, LGPL, MIT, Apache, BSD, CC, etc licensing. They invent a lot of policies to keep them from being liable. Some places you can't even look at the source of a page that's GPL'd because that might be considered infringement or breaking license if their company happened to develop something similar 5 years later.

It's an absolute ridiculous mess legally. Even the staunchest advocates of GPL don't really agree on what it means in all cases. The bottom line is GPL was designed to be invasive and spread, which is fine for non commercials, but becomes very confusing and conflicted in commercial environments.

I like creative commons. If you're releasing something and want others to be able to use it, use creative commons!

Oli

Written Mar. 19, 2008 / Report /

... though I'm not sure if that forces the release of source code when distributed, like the GPL does...

One thing you should remember: if people make changes to the code for their own personal (or company) copy, that's not seen as distribution and you have no right to that code.

There are also some fishy parts (with all licenses) where things could be a base (but not an integral dependency), website back-ends where the output isn't really classifiable as a distribution and other gumph like that.

But most of the pain comes from people trying to use your work as Alex said. If you want to use something that's open source, you need to make sure you're not going to infringe on the terms - which can be a problem if you're not planning on releasing your own source or you have elements included in your work that aren't open source.