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Raven24 / diaspora-federation

MIT License
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Pick a license... #7

Closed Raven24 closed 9 years ago

Raven24 commented 10 years ago

IMHO there are three possible choices for this gem

anyone got some specific pros/cons?

Flaburgan commented 10 years ago

MIT and BSD always looked almost the same for me, and I don't know ISC. Gems usually use MIT, don't they?

ghost commented 10 years ago

I'm probably lacking some context here, but I'd still like to suggest the Apache License v2.0

"Unlike the BSD, MIT, and the Apache License, v1.1, the Apache License, v2.0, also explicitly grants rights under a patent claims that may exist in the original Work. [...] The Apache License, v2.0, operates substantially like the MIT, BSD, and Apache License, v1.1, with some additional benefits."

St. Laurent, A. M. (2004). Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing. O’Reilly Media. http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/

copiesofcopies commented 10 years ago

(I'm a lawyer, but this is not legal advice.)

MIT, (2-clause) BSD, and ISC are functionally identical, and they are all compatible with the AGPL, so any of them can be used here. As @Flaburgan said, MIT is the most commonly used among the Ruby/Rails community, so that may be a reason to give it the edge over BSD and ISC.

As @christophe-de says, the Apache 2.0 is similar to these licenses in that it's a permissive (rather than copyleft) license and compatible with the AGPL, but different in that it contains an explicit patent license. The patent clause requires that each contributor license any applicable patent claims to all licensees. It only applies to patent claims that would otherwise be infringed by the version of the software the patent holder contributes to (i.e. it wouldn't include a license for features added later by other contributors).

Many people believe that FOSS licenses that do not have explicit patent licenses nonetheless carry an implicit license, or that a patent infringement lawsuit by a contributor against a lawful licensee would be dismissed by a judge for equitable estoppel purposes. As I wrote in this blog post, there is a lawsuit ongoing in federal court that will test this issue.

This kind of lawsuit is one reason why a project might choose Apache 2.0 over MIT.

jhass commented 10 years ago

Very informative, thank you!

I'm still voting for MIT I think.

Raven24 commented 10 years ago

thanks for the input, everyone. since I'm not the sole author of all the code here, I wanted some opinions before reaching a conclusion. I think MIT should do just fine.

jaywink commented 10 years ago

MIT sounds good to me too.

dimaursu commented 9 years ago

There are more than one licenses that were invented at MIT, but it's safe to assume in this case we are talking about Expat (the one used in the Ruby community). I'd go with Apache here, for the patent reason: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat ; These guys did their homework, I'm sure they know what they are talking about.

On a side note, this is a very special case of a piece of software: it's an implementation of what wants to be a protocol: maybe the protocol conventions should be enforced by the license? If that is so, to what degree? How can we ensure that the protocol is open to extension and improvements, yet nobody would break it?

Is there any analogical & popular pieces of software? (popular - because it's more likely they hit legal issues)

Raven24 commented 9 years ago

this is closed by 6c1e96b15aae55a2db130cf56089f565748ce6f3 ... thanks for the opinions @ all