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n8chz / prostetnic

The prostetnic highlighter, a Firefox add-on for highlighting text in web pages.
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Consider using a known license #8

Closed davidhedlund closed 9 years ago

davidhedlund commented 9 years ago

I appreciate that you distribute this software as free. However, adding custom licensed softwares requires professional software licensing consultation to add this add-on to places like directory.fsf.org.

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for the most well known free software licenses.

n8chz commented 9 years ago

I'm aware of FSF's principle that copyright precedes copyleft. As far as I know, CC-0 is the most permissive license available (second to Cypherpunks' Anti License, if it were a license, which it's not). Would CC-0 pass your organization's muster without legal hand-wringing?

davidhedlund commented 9 years ago

@n8chz Indeed, Cypherpunks' Anti License is not a license, it is a public domain declaration. It is written in a legally confused way: it uses the misleading vague term "IP".

If you really want to put a work in the public domain, CC0 is better. However, if you want to allow completely unlimited use of nontrivial program code, we recommend you release it under Apache 2.0 (which has a useful patent retaliation feature) rather than putting it in the public domain.

For a substantial program, it is better in most cases to copyleft it.

See http://gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html.