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RedPRL / sml-redprl

The People's Refinement Logic
http://www.redprl.org/
MIT License
227 stars 18 forks source link

Switch to left-wing license #93

Closed jonsterling closed 7 years ago

jonsterling commented 8 years ago

At this point, I'm not sure there's much point in continuing to use the MIT license; I have always used it for everything since I was used to doing industrial open-source, but I think that our values would be better served by using a left-wing license, such as some variant of GPL.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

@RedPRL/politburo @david-christiansen

diakopter commented 8 years ago

You guys. I seriously can't tell whether or not this is satire... I kind of hope it's satire, because left-wing values?

jonsterling commented 8 years ago

@diakopter: This is off topic; this thread is for discussion of licenses. I want to make clear, no decision has been made, and I am interested in feedback from people who have used copyleft licenses before—negative feedback is especially welcome.

david-christiansen commented 8 years ago

I don't think GPL is any more or less left-wing than the MIT license.

I'm not really a stakeholder in RedPRL, given that I'm neither a user nor a developer, so I'll refrain from advocating a particular choice. But I think that the choice of license should depend on what one hopes to attain.

What are your goals here?

GPL and variants thereof have been useful in the past for helping downstream users of corporate-adopted software maintain their rights. It's quite possible that we would not have WebKit today if KHTML had been MIT-licensed instead of LGPL, for instance. However, with more and more software being centralized, the GPL is perhaps less useful than in the past, because running a network service doesn't trigger the "source follows modified versions" clause. Proof assistants seem amenable to this model, so if your goal with copyleft is to keep someone from making a proprietary RedPRL fork that deprives its users of their rights, then AGPL might be worth considering.

Copyleft licenses have been a problem in the past for people working in environments that are too suspicious of them. I've heard stories of idiotic corporate environments where they couldn't install ghc-mod on their machines because there was a corporate policy against copyleft, for instance. So a copyleft license might get in the way of workers who want to use RedPRL, but are prevented from doing so. If your goal is that anyone should be able to use it, then in our present environment, copyleft might not be a good idea.

When I do a license choice, I typically look at the community I'm in, and try to reduce it being a pain. So Pudding is LGPL because that's what Racket is, idris-mode is GPL because it builds on other things from other Emacs modes that are GPL, and my Idris bits are typically BSD like Idris. I suppose there aren't the same kinds of community norms to work with here, though.

jonsterling commented 8 years ago

Thanks David for the feedback and information! Also thanks to others who have contacted me personally to provide their opinions.

I think I would like to holf off on making a decision here for the time being, but will leave this ticket open so that people may continue posting their opinions and feedback. I am inclined at the moment to make no change to the existing license, but am open to it if there is sufficient reason.