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accodeing / fortnox-api

Gem that abstracts Fortnox's F3 API
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
9 stars 8 forks source link

License #142

Open d-Pixie opened 6 years ago

d-Pixie commented 6 years ago

@ehannes and I got to talking about why the license was changed from MIT to LGPL v3. Right then I could not remember but I have looked at it now and I do remember. MIT is a very free license, allowing, for example, commercial use without reciprocity, which is why I changed it to LGPL v3 that also allows free use but requires any changes to be published and also requires a similar license to be used in the product in question.

I'm also thinking we should change the licensing model again to follow a dual license model (as described for example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing#Single-Vendor_Commercial_Open_Source_Business_Model). This would still allow other free and open source projects to use the library but would also require anyone making money off of it to pay back to us (the managing company). It's basically the "If you make money from it we make money from it" model.

My suggestion would be to change the license to GPL, not lesser, for the free part to enforce the open source of any derivative projects and give another commercial license to companies that want to pay and use it in a closed source product.

d-Pixie commented 6 years ago

@felixyz I'd really like your feedback on this as well, since you are our only outside contributor right now. Would this be a problem for you?

felixyz commented 6 years ago

@d-Pixie IMO the simpler the licensing, the better. And in reality MIT or BSD seem to work out well for OSS in that most people/orgs want to contribute back in any case because it's costly and risky to maintain a fork and sharing simply makes most sense for everyone. And many big commercial organizations simply don't use GPL libraries, which is a win for no-one. Perhaps you could explore other ways of getting potential big players to contribute, like offering an enterprise version or something?

All that said, if you do change to GPL, it won't deter me from using the gem, since I definitely want to contribute whatever improvements I make.