Which License should I pick?

[Hans Ekbrand]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 11:15:24AM -0800, Scott Long wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > This is going to be a moderately long message, but I believe the 
> > > license to be one of the more important things to get right
> > 
> > You might want to start with the "safest" license, the GPL.  You can 
> > always change your mind, or go for a dual-license.
> 
> Upon some consideration, I think this is the best thing to do for the time 
> being. As you say, I can dual-license it in the future if necessary.

While I really do like the GPL, I just want to remind you that if you
want to dual-license in the future you must then get the consent of
all contributors, since each contributor is the copyright holder of
his or her contributions (unless you have made them give up their
copyright to you).

> Like you say, it's good to keep as many options open as possible, and it's 
> hard to go back on a licensing decision if it's too broad.

No it is the other way around: if the program is released under a less
restricted license, e.g. xfree86-ish, then you could always, without
the consent of contributors, change to (L)GPL for newer versions. The
wine project (http://www.winehq.org) is a real world example of such a
change.

The risk you take with a less restricted license for a start is that
someone will fork your project. Which is exactly what happened to
wine, since a company, transgaming, wanted to keep the possibility of
adding proprietary code to the free (Xfree86 style) wine base.
However, the GPL tree will always have the advantage of being able to
merge enhancements done to the fork.

-- 
Hans Ekbrand (http://sociologi.cjb.net) <hans at sociologi.cjb.net>



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