On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 05:19:31PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > The GNU GPL is the appropriate license here, please use it instead of > contributing to license proliferation, as recommended by Debian's > guide for upstreams: As someone who has written Free Software for nearly 20 years, I completely agree with what Paul is saying here. For your general requirements, the GPL seems to be the best fit. Coincidently or perhaps not, it is also the license most of the software I write uses. The GPL effectively says, "here is what you can do with my software, but if you change or distribute it, you have to do the same too". I know its tempting to try to tweak licenses but so, so many people get it wrong. The problem is that we're usually better programmers than we are laywers which is something I'm personally very happy about. License choice is hard; even now (or two years ago) on new projects and not ones I inherit it takes time. What is even harder than license choice is license creation. Large companies have tried it and screwed it up. There is also the problem with code-sharing which if you use something that isn't one of the common ones, code sharing starts to become impossible. Alternatively I know right now any piece of GPL licensed code from any project I can reuse on my GPL projects. I don't even need to stop and think about it; it's just there. And the other way around, your project has a problem already solved in another GPL project? You got the code already. My strong suggestion to you is choose any one of the DFSG-free licenses. A weaker suggestion is that the GPL will serve most of your goals. As an author, you are absolutely free to choose any license for code you wrote, which is why they are only suggestions. Doing this will free you from writing less legal blah and more C code (or whatever your language preference is). To me that's a win for everyone. - Craig -- Craig Small VK2XLZ http://enc.com.au/ csmall at : enc.com.au Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org/ csmall at : debian.org GPG fingerprint: 5D2F B320 B825 D939 04D2 0519 3938 F96B DF50 FEA5
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