Closed erikbgithub closed 11 years ago
The following pages give an overview about the topic and introduce the most important licenses and further resources.
by Cameron Shapman, Smashing Magazine, 2010 found with Google
by Ed Burnett, ZDNet, 2006 (found via [Shapman2010])
This article gives a guide about making the right decisions about what you want from a license and discusses more options then the first article does.
Questions to ask, when choosing a license:
Licenses discussed (and which questions are answered "yes", ~
means "maybe"):
If necessary it is possible to ask a user to fulfil additional requirements before a license is granted. This leads to multi licensing of the same software, i.e. FOSS usage gets GPL license while commercial usage must pay for an individual license.
Ben Adida, OpenACS, Year unknown (found in [Shapman2010])
This article doesn't discuss how to choose an open source license, but rather how and why those licenses exist. It explains what copyright is and what might be considered a derivative work, that every developer owns the copy right on his specific small part of a project, and that licensing is done for the whole project. That means earlier or later a lot of people need to be involved, if changes to the licensing of a project should be done. Therefore and because some licenses state it explicitely, a license shoulde be considered static, once a project decided for it.
It also talks about the GPL, which is often called *copyleft because it trys to use copyright laws to deactivate copyright itself.
Free Software Foundation, Year unknown
David A. Wheeler, 2002-2013 (found via [DFSG-FAQ])
Rick Moen, EMail, 1999
Jeremy Allison, tuxdeluxe.org, 2007
Massimo D'Antoni, Maria Alessandra Rossi, Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Siena
There are different articles on Wikipedia, which are handled in short in this chapter.
TODO:
In Detail:
TODO: Review and add links. It's not much more then brain storming now.
Compatibility Chart, taken from David A. Wheeler, 2007
If your software is directly or indirectly reachable by the license of a software package you want to use, then both are compatible. It is possible to reach GPLv3 from BSD-new so a GPLv3 project can use BSD-new licensed code. The other way is not possible, because no arrows go from GPLv3 to BSD-new, not even indirectly.
If there is not a very special situation one of the following 2 should be chosen:
A. GPLv3 (and later) B. Apache License 2.0 Reasons:
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/
C. Docs: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Other things to consider:
I believe that software as representation of knowledge/idea should be free -> pro GPL
==> Light preference towards "GPLv3 or later"
Presentation is prepared. If it is possible to show it in public is still open
Presented and therefore finished.
Current status March 2017 from a lawyer: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perception-Report.html#
Summary: If you want to license FOSS source code
Conclusion is that GPLv2 would've been slightly better for MONK than GPLv3+.
Problem
MONK has no real open source license yet.
Solution
Find out, what the keywords in licensing are, which are the most important open source licenses and on which basis they can be compared. Detail the information about the resources used for the research as well as the differences between those licenses, so that based on this issue a decision can be made, which license is to be applied to MONK.
Notes
This issue contains only the texts linked here and a presentation in the Google Driver folders of DResearch Fahrzeugelektronik GmbH. A review of the presentation should be sufficient to close this Issue.