Best licence for my software?

Matthew Seth Flaschen superm40 at comcast.net
Sun Apr 17 19:16:09 UTC 2005


I wrote:

>>I would go with LGPL for the library and GPL for the rest. (this ignores 
>>your separation of university students and employees, which isn't
>>opensource, according to OSI and me)  :) 

NSK wrote:

>>Thanks for your suggestions.

>>I thought it would be non-opensource if the licensing terms place special 
>>restrictions on a specific group of people (discrimination). But my idea was 
>>to copyleft it and only give greater freedoms to university people.

I know you see it like that.  But say, you offer license A to everyone,
and license B to only university students.  Then assume license B has
"better" terms[meaning less copyleft]. You are discriminating against
the non-university people by not given them "better terms", so license
B is discriminative, and therefore non-opensource. It's just a
question of perspective.

I'm CCing the license-discuss list. It may be helpful to them, and
they will probably want to comment. You should try to CC them as well.
-Matthew Flaschen






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