69 lines
3.7 KiB
Org Mode
69 lines
3.7 KiB
Org Mode
#+title: My choices of software licenses
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#&summary
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Which licenses do I use, and why?
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#&
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#+startup: showall
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#+license: bysa
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* My choices of software licenses
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I like strong copyleft, the stuff found in the GNU General Public License, the
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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, and others. I like how people cannot
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take the code or culture I contributed to the world and turn it into something
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non-free. I have used those licenses a lot.
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For cultural works, it seems to me that the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
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Alike has a strong following; of course some people dislike it for being a long,
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legalese text, but my general impression is that people who want to create
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sharable and modifiable cultural works like it just fine. If there was a large
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resistance towards the BY-SA, making something available under that license
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would mean excluding many people from remixing that something, just because of
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their dislike of the license. Since that doesn't appear to be the case, I'll
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happily continue to use the BY-SA license.
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For software, on the other hand, there are many loud voices against the
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GPL. [[http://dustycloud.org/blog/field-guide-to-copyleft][This article]] explains the arguments well. As much as I like to copyleft my
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code, I find it even more important that it's not lonely; and if so many are
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against the strong copyleft in the GPL, I feel I must concede and release my
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software under BSD3 or something on that level of lack of user freedom.
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I only see two reasons to not use strong copyleft with a program (and they
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overlap):
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+ If the main objective of the software is to become widespread (like how the
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Ogg Ogg/Vorbis codec uses a lax license --- which, by the way, [[https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3][RMS agrees]]
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with)
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+ If so many people dislike strong copyleft that too few are willing to
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contribute to a strong copyleft project (my reason)
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I'm not that interested in whether GPL usage is currently dropping or rising, or
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that the GPL is still very widely used; what interests me is that a high number
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of projects simply do not use the GPL. I found the [[https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/is_copyleft_being_framed.html][Is copyleft being framed?]]
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talk interesting, but copyleft being framed doesn't change the data at
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[[http://flossmole.org]]: [[http://flossmole.org/system/files/FreecodeLicenses2012.png][this]] and [[http://flossmole.org/system/files/FSFLicenseCounts2012_0.png][this]] show that while GPL usage is high, so is the
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combined use of BSD3, Expat/MIT, Apache 2.0, and other lax licenses.
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A (for me) important example of where a lax license (in this case the BSD3) is
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pretty much used everywhere is Haskell's package collection, [[http://hackage.haskell.org/][Hackage]]. If I came
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along with a GPL-licensed program, it would be pretty lonely.
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I must remind myself that strong copyleft was never an end in itself, but merely
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a help. From now on (Oct 10, 2012), I'll make new software written by myself
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available under the BSD3 license. If at some point in the future, the usage of a
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lax licenses drops a lot and the usage of strong copyleft licenses rises (I
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don't think that'll happen), I might switch back to using a strong copyleft
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license. Until then, let the BSD3 experiment begin!
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The main point of it all is to share code both ways, and if that flow works
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better with a lax license, then I think I'm okay with the risk of someone
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putting it into a proprietary program, even though I find that amoral.
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I'm not going to relicense past (A|L)?GPL'd programs I've written unless someone
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asks me to.
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I'll still contribute to strong copyleft software, but I might mention this URL.
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If I were to place myself in a camp, it would be the
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I-like-copyleft-sometimes-but-I-like-sharing-code-even-more camp.
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