On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 12:37:04AM +0900, Trans wrote: > > Uh oh. We were doing so well! A potentially flaming subject kept to a > congenial ember. > > Tell you what. Lets now take a different bent: Here is what I think I > learned from this thread. > > 1) Licensing can be complicated ;) > 2) Unless you have specific reasons to do otherwise pick a very simple > one like MIT. > Specific reasons are either: > 1) I demand all derivative works also be OSS. > 2) This software is mine mine mine (non-OSS or partial-OSS) > 3) Another lib, that I must use, is forcing my hand. > 3) Ruby license is not a good license to use, but unfortunately so > many Rubyists have used it we are kind of stuck with it --see 2.3 > above. Thankfully, clause 4 of the license gets us out of point 2.1 > (barely?). I'm not quite as well-versed in the MIT license as I am in some others. It is often compared with the BSD license as having similar terms, however, so I'll speak about the BSD license here (with which I'm more familiar). The BSD license actually provides for the code covered by the license to be forevermore "open source". There's a common misconception that the BSD license and similar licenses somehow allow you to make the code in them proprietary. That's not legally possible, as the BSD license contains an inheritance clause that mandates further copies of the code be distributed under the same license. The difference between that and the voracious nature of the GPL is that the BSD license allows covered code to be "wrapped" in code of another license, such that a complete project can be distributed under the licensing terms of the copyright holder's choice while the specific parts of it that are licensed BSD remain under the BSD license's terms. The GPL demands that everything that is connected to code it covers must also be distributed under its terms. So . . . the MIT license may very well be quite suitable to situations where you "demand that all derivative works also be OSS". That really depends on how you mean that statement to be interpreted. As for the flame war prone nature of license discussions, I guess I probably should have left well enough alone rather than asking someone to keep his/her personal opinions down to a dull roar. The obvious pro-GPL implications of a preceding message in this thread seemed to require some correction, and I made the mistake of not realizing attempting to cut the rhetoric away from the facts would be something like throwing fuel on a fire. I apologize for that misjudgment. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Phillip J. Haack: "Productivity is not about speed. It's about velocity. You can be fast, but if you're going in the wrong direction, you're not helping anyone."