Choice of open source license

[Aircoookie]

Trustpoint should be available under a suitable proper open source license as soon as possible, but the license should be carefully chosen, as it is very difficult to change the license down the line, impacts the legal usability of Trustpoint (particularly in proprietary contexts) and may lead to compliance issues if a dependency license is incompatible.

Things to consider:

• Dependency licenses: Must be compatible. Particularly notorious is the GPL strong copyleft requirement, i.e. using GPL or AGPLed code in most cases forces one to use that license too. If copyleft is desired, EUPL is probably a better choice. However, this means we can't use GPL code.
• Industry requirements: With most copyleft licenses, simply speaking, you are required to publish the source of any modifications you distribute - this makes proprietary forks less feasible. This may be something we want, or something we want to prevent. A permissively licensed project might be useful to more companies.
• Future requirements: As long as the project is funded and we work on it, it does not really matter, but after the project ends, it may be more likely to get significant community contributions with some licenses rather then others.

For example, my private project WLED is licensed under MIT, a permissive license. You can basically do what you want with it as long as you retain the copyright notice and don't sue me. This could be a good choice for Trustpoint as well for the highest adoptability.

For copyleft licenses, EUPL-1.2 seems great. It has quite the defined legal framework in the EU and allows re-use of the code under several other copyleft licenses, like GPL, MPL 2.0, EPL, ...

[AlexHx8472]

We should discuss this in the group again before switching to a public repository, shouldn't we.

[Aircoookie]

Not necessarily, since no license is the same as all rights reserved. But I agree it would be cleaner to have the proper license on public release right away.