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ufal / public-license-selector

Tool that will help you select the right open license for your data or software
https://ufal.github.io/public-license-selector
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No GPL recommendation for libraries #11

Open LourensVeen opened 6 years ago

LourensVeen commented 6 years ago

If I select software/my own code/yes/library the selector suggests five different weak copyleft licenses, but not the GPL, even though the GPL would also be compatible with those choices.

thawn commented 2 months ago

I think the current recommendation is sensible.

Without wanting to start a licensing flame war, here is why: A GPL licensed library forces all code that uses the library to use GPL. Even if the code only uses the compiled binaries of the library. In my humble opinion, this defeats the purpose of a library.

I personally am almost always using BSD-3, which means I cannot write code that depends on GPL licensed libraries.

LourensVeen commented 2 months ago

It seems to me that the goal of this widget is to help people to choose a license that matches the conditions that they want to put on their code. So if they want to put a condition on there that says that they want their library to be used only in FOSS, then they should be getting a recommendation for the GPL. I don't see why the widget should decide for them that that's a bad idea. As you say, opinions vary, and I'll-share-mine-if-you-share-yours sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

As for using a GPL library in a permissively-licensed project, you can do that because the GPL allows you to give additional permissions for your own code. So as long as the licenses are compatible (GPLv2 and Apache2 is the only problem with commonly used licenses) you're fine. If you really want to be sure, dual-license your own code BSD-3 and GPL.

Of course, if someone wanted to use your code in a proprietary program, then they would have to replace the GPL dependency first, after which they can use the rest under the BSD-3 license.