Some thoughts on licensing

[bofh]

While looking at stuff today, I started to think about licensing. We already have some tools coming up, and a hardware schematic on the site. And no concept of what we want for a license. Now not everyone will want the same license for a submission. For example, Calvin's TARI software will only be free as in beer, but not GPL. Which is fine, and I will still use the tool... But, do we want to "encourage" people to GPL what goes here? Do we care? Because if we do, it will be easier to set a standard now, rather than later.

[LGT-3-6]

While looking at stuff today, I started to think about licensing. We already have some tools coming up, and a hardware schematic on the site. And no concept of what we want for a license. Now not everyone will want the same license for a submission. For example, Calvin's TARI software will only be free as in beer, but not GPL. Which is fine, and I will still use the tool... But, do we want to "encourage" people to GPL what goes here? Do we care? Because if we do, it will be easier to set a standard now, rather than later.

I'm not that far off from a release.. Things like this make me apprehensive of the whole thing. I think I will probably do binary only first and see what the reactions are before deciding on a license. Seeing as though there are quite a few people that seem to be writing at least a little code, we want to pick something which will give us all the least amount of headaches.

I do prefer free as in speech though.

[calvinc]

Calvin's TARI software will only be free as in beer, but not GPL.

the beer was a joke i dont expect any reward for my contribution other than to build a user base for it.

i am not keen in releasing the source for DL1 purely because it is such a mess. ecuExplorer is a much better design/concept and possibly that will be up for GPL.

the problem with GPL is people taking that knowledge and using it for commercial gain. if they change the GUI and keep the innards then you will never know and they got a paying product with minimal effort.

calvin.

[cboles]

I agree with Calvin about the commercial use issue. A lot of GPL'd code gets lifted for commercial use without the modified source going back to the community. I'd like to see code staying in free projects, although the open source nature can't keep people from stealing it, regardless of the license.

[LGT-3-6]

I think the only way around it is to make the open source project good enough so that nobody would actually pay for X. Of course you can do binary analysis, to see if they copied code verbatim, but who has the time to do that?

[bofh]

There is a group that does nothing but go after companies that abuse GPL code. They have done quite well in getting large companies to release the source. I just can't for the life of me remember who.

Also, Calvin... The free as in beer reference is a long standing GPL statement to differentiate between "free software" and "free code" as the distinction can be tough. The full statement is "free as in beer or free as in speech" referring to the "free speech" thing us Americans seem to fixate on, even as we loose more of it each day. <sigh>