As an open-source organisation, we frequently find ourselves working with various licenses. Our own projects are made available licensed under the GPLv3.0, AGPLv3.0, MIT, ISC, or are formally unlicensed (implicitly, all rights reserved).
These licenses, as well as the GPL 2.0, LGPL 2 and 3, Apache 2.0, Mozilla MPL 2.0, and 2 or 3-clause BSD frequently come up, and most of the time do not introduce license incompatibility concerns. We also use code under CDDL (a copyleft GPL-incompatible license) and the OpenSSL license (also GPL-incompatible), and the Postgres License, which strongly resembles MIT or BSD.
However, with these >14 different licesnses (all of which are "open source" per OSI, and many of which are Libre, per GNU), there are a lot of terms/conditions to keep track of, and potentially unwanted interactions between. Further, it is quite likely that we engage in various non-free licenses to use hardware we have (sometimes in embedded appliances such as our EAS equipment or AoIP network, but also in general-purpose computers), and per #31 could be effected when our upstreams relicense software to be non-free.
We should make an effort to 1) track the licenses of software we use, 2) consolidate what our own code is licensed under, 3) codify why our software is licensed to guide future decisions, and 4) evaluate the effects of non-free code on our general ethos and on our operations, and identify where it is acceptable or not.
As an open-source organisation, we frequently find ourselves working with various licenses. Our own projects are made available licensed under the GPLv3.0, AGPLv3.0, MIT, ISC, or are formally unlicensed (implicitly, all rights reserved).
These licenses, as well as the GPL 2.0, LGPL 2 and 3, Apache 2.0, Mozilla MPL 2.0, and 2 or 3-clause BSD frequently come up, and most of the time do not introduce license incompatibility concerns. We also use code under CDDL (a copyleft GPL-incompatible license) and the OpenSSL license (also GPL-incompatible), and the Postgres License, which strongly resembles MIT or BSD.
However, with these >14 different licesnses (all of which are "open source" per OSI, and many of which are Libre, per GNU), there are a lot of terms/conditions to keep track of, and potentially unwanted interactions between. Further, it is quite likely that we engage in various non-free licenses to use hardware we have (sometimes in embedded appliances such as our EAS equipment or AoIP network, but also in general-purpose computers), and per #31 could be effected when our upstreams relicense software to be non-free.
We should make an effort to 1) track the licenses of software we use, 2) consolidate what our own code is licensed under, 3) codify why our software is licensed to guide future decisions, and 4) evaluate the effects of non-free code on our general ethos and on our operations, and identify where it is acceptable or not.