Re: Licenses for Dummies

["Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com>]

on Wed, May 21, 2003 at 10:26:58AM -0700, Bill Moseley (moseley@hank.org) wrote:
> I figure there's people here that can help point me to good resources.
> 
> I've read LGPL and GPL and the "why not use LGPL" page[1].  Still, I'm not that clear in
> simple terms what is allowed.  And also how BSD or Apache or Artistic compare.
> 
> Can someone point me to a good page for explaining the licenses -- other than to the 
> actual licenses.


Please set your mailer/editor linewrap to 68-75 characters.  I strongly
recommend 72 as a good default.

Thank you.



The GNU licenses page is pretty good for describing licenses, briefly,
according to its own typology (largely:  free or non-free, and for free,
GPL compatible or not).

_Open Source, the Unauthorized White Papers_, aside from a really
gwadawful title, is a good overview of licensing, as is _Open Sources_
from O'Reilly.

The license-discuss mailing list (hosted by Open Source Initiative), the
fsl-discuss legal issues mailing list (which I moderate:
http://lists.alt.org/ for info), and the gnu.misc.discuss Usenet group
are other useful sources.

Note that in my experience, most licensing questions result in the
following advice:

  - Don't write your own license.  Applies doubly if you have a lawyer.
    Triply if you _are_ a lawyer.  It's a bad idea, mostl often poorly
    executed, and tends to be money (and lots of it) wasted.  85%+ of
    software is licensed, or available under, the GNU GPL or LGPL, the
    bulk of the remainder under BSD/MIT, Artistic, MozPL, or similar
    licenses.  All other licenses are basically line noise at ~2-3% of
    licensed works (confirm yourself against the Sourceforge archive or
    Debian's own /usr/share/doc/*/copyright files).

  - Use one or more of the GNU GPL, the LGPL, the BSD (GPL compatible),
    or MozPL licenses.

  - If you're considering free software distribition of software *you
    wholly wrote or wholly control copyright for*, and want to retain
    rights to commercially distribute the same work, look at a dual
    license under GPL, plus your proprietary license, and get copyright
    assignment from your external developers.  This is the path followed
    by Alladin Ghostscript, Red Hat Cygwin, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org / 
    StarOffice, TrollTech Qt, and other projects.  Note that the GPL
    gives you *more* commercial protection than the LGPL, particularly
    for libraries (eg: Cygwin/CYGWIN32.DLL).  The Sleepycat / berkeleydb
    licensing model is another one to look at.

And lastly:  continue this discussion on a different list.

IANAL, TINLA, YADA.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I
    wasn't a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak
    up, because I wasn't a Jew.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I
    didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant.  Then they came for me,
    and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
    -- Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945