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RaspberryPiFoundation / lesson_format

Lesson formatter
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Add an MIT license #114

Closed andylolz closed 9 years ago

andylolz commented 9 years ago

Fixes #98.

Jonic commented 9 years ago

Hey Andy :)

Rik mentioned this pull request, and we both had reservations about the fact that the MIT license allows people to sell copies of the "software". Not that anyone WOULD, but it doesn't seem like a good fit for us.

The output of the projects is all licensed under a CC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which seems more "Code Club". People can modify and redistribute, so long as they don't make any money and they release it under the same license.

I wasn't involved in the decision behind choosing that license, but it feels like the right fit to me! I'm guessing it was chosen for a reason!

Rik suggested that rather than just merging this one in we discussed it here first. Maybe there are advantages to the MIT license that we're not seeing? What made you pick that one in particular?

Jonic :)

andylolz commented 9 years ago

Hi @Jonic!

I’ve queried the NC clause on the lessons elsewhere (#41) but I do recognise that someone could potentially profit from those.

In the case of the lesson formatter, I don’t see much potential for commercial gain off the back of this code. Even if you could figure out a way to commercially benefit, you’d be better off rewriting it from scratch! So in the “open by default” spirit, I picked MIT as the most permissive licence (cf. jQuery; Rails).

andylolz commented 9 years ago

From speaking with others in Code Club, I’m now far more inclined towards GPLv2 (also for CodeClub/codeclub-world, which is more pressingly lacking a licence.) It doesn’t prevent commercial use, but it does require that derivative works make their source available under the same terms.