[License-discuss] Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

"Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> writes:

> Karl Fogel wrote:
>> It makes sense to tune the page toward one special kind of visitor: a
>> person who doesn't know much about licenses, doesn't feel the need to
>> get expert help, and is just going to pick one.
>
> I would probably recommend to someone who doesn't really care about his
> copyright other than to give it away to use CC0 or the BSD license. I'd even
> sign that as the opinion of an open source expert although I'd thoroughly
> disclaim it as legal advice!
>
> That's a cheap recommendation, and worth what you all paid for it.
>
> I'm definitely not prepared to recommend the GPL without a good deal more
> information about the visitor to the website. Neither should OSI.
>
> /Larry

On the other hand, I've worked for an employer before where I had
assumed maybe they wanted a non-copyleft license, I asked before
releasing the code under MIT, and they said ~"we want the language with
the strongest amount of protections", by which in further conversation
it meant "we want the strongest copyleft because we don't want to
release something and then have someone swoop in and commandeer it".  So
yes, discussions with the visitor of the website are important... but on
both ends.

I'd say 'A good solution is probably to separate the two bits into "copyleft" and
"non-copyleft" (or the reverse... I don't care much) sections', though
the page already does kind of do that with the note that says "this is a
copyleft license" with a link to more information.

I also agree that Apache License 2.0 should go before BSD and MIT... I
feel like we learned that lesson over CC0 discussions.

By the way Karl Fogel: this page is excellent... thanks for taking the
time to do it!  I think it's in the right direction.

 - Christopher Allan Webber