Replies: 10 comments 8 replies
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I would just stay with MIT. Let them make money of it. So what? |
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The thing with topics like that is, it always gets political... People are favoring GPL over MIT because "FREEDOM". Looking at the downvotes I got on this you can see that even people who downvoted me are using the MIT-License on their own repos... yeah sure, make out of that what you will :) |
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I get that there are people that recommend the GPL because of "freedom" but to me, it's more specific than that -- it's about sharing improvements without letting others lock down the code. Even if a fork doesn't upstream the code, others can still review the changes made to that fork and learn from them because the GPL requires that users have access to the source code, even with derivatives. I've looked at some of the popular browser alternatives to Chrome to see if they have publicly shared their source code:
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Of course. It works both ways, and I wasn't saying that you did bring that argument. Android is powered by Linux as well, and the Android core is open source. It's not much a concern to the majority of the user base,though, because it is almost worthless without the Play Services and the Play Store and so on and so on. Ubuntu on the other hand uses Linux and is almost fully open source. There is not an immediate argument against the gpl, but it also has its downsides |
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As an independent developer trying to build something useful for everyone tired of the same thing and trying to prevent companies from taking the free ride on somebody else's work. What would be the downsides of GPL? My downvote is not because of MIT, it's because of this comment:
It shows that you have yet to learn what a license is for. And it's not about politics; it's a legal matter. Companies (lawyers) don't like GPL because they can't legally close the code. And if you want your code to be open and let everyone benefit from it without any restrictions but also share any derivatives, make it GPL. |
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No, i don't have to learn that. I just really don't think it's worth the hassle to think about every restriction that comes with the gpl |
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There may not be a problem with it. But I understand that more companies are trying to protect their work with dual licensing. Maybe it's not something that we should worry about (indeed: so what?). But it might not hurt to think about it a bit I guess |
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I checked godot/godot and they are using MIT as well. It this project gains any traction at all, you will be fine with that license, as there is much opportunity to still start a foundation and make money from it to support development. Even if large corps would use the code in that project, that would make it even easier to get them on board as they could easily contribute to upstream without worrying about the license, and every project using Gosub is contributing indirectly to it, because the engine being used needs to be supported by the visited websites, so devs get aware of it |
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look for MongoDB approach, i think you need to create costume licenses like MongoDB with Server Side Public License |
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Hello cool initiative. The problem if you choose to prohibit commercial use of the product it stops being a Open Source license by the definition of the OSI and that would probably decrement the usage of the tool at large. The Server Side Public License is also not recognized as strictly open source (lot of controversy came from that) and I think it only adds to infrastructure related code (I may be wrong) and wouldn't apply for a desktop application. If you want to stick to open source can either keep the mit license or change it to a gpl license, if you want to avoid a more competitive situation in the future in which a huge company steals your code, adds improvements as closed source and you don't get the source code of said improvements, that may however reduce the amount of contributions on the project. I would in this case go forth with the MIT, as it won't be a saas company that is the most common case of this being a problem, but you should weigh what you want to do with the solution in the future and choose acordingly based on those requirements. PD: the official github webpage to help choosing a license may be useful for you if you haven't already check it out https://choosealicense.com/ |
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You could also instead of aiming for one license for all the project, separate it in multiple packages/repositories and decide the licensing that feels most appropiate for each component, also allowing easier distribution and source management for people who just want to use/contribute to a certain functionality |
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From your blog post, it sounds like the bigger issue is companies taking one's work under a permissive license and creating or distributing a proprietary version, not necessarily whether or not one profits from it. I think the GPL offers an option closest to your goals, at least to my understanding. While the GPL doesn't prohibit anyone to profit from it, it does state that no one can create derivatives that turn it into a proprietary app, where the source code isn't available.
The GPL allows anyone to sell copies of the software. While many OSS project opt to provide the software at gratis, it is a misconception many people make. The "free" refers to "freedom", not "free beer"; sometimes "libre" is used to describe this to avoid this double meaning. There is potentially the situation where a distributor can provide binaries of the software without the source code by default. However, users have the right to request the source code after being provided the binary (e.g. the source code doesn't necessarily need to be public but does need to be provided at a user's request).
There seems to be a misconception that equates the GPL as a Contributor License Agreement, or CLA, when that is not the case. |
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It seems like the GPL best fits your requirements. The only downside of it, as already mentioned, is that it may curb adoption of and contributions to your project (especially by commercial parties) as others would be required to license their works using your projects as GPL as well (and so they might decide against using and becoming involved in your project in the first place). You may instead consider the LGPL, which allows your libraries to be used in otherwise closed source applications as long as direct modifications to your code are open sourced and these applications relying on your software can be used/recompiled with a modified version of your code. Of course, as open source enthusiasts we shall never give proprietary software developers any advantages they don't already have ;) (see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html) You should also note that as long as the rights granted to you by contributors concerning their contributions to your project allow it (this is why you should have a CLA), you may freely switch licenses later. All contributors retain their copyright (which includes the right to choose a license) when choosing for example GPL, LGPL, MIT or Apache. A counterexample would be CC0 (releasing the works into public domain). Note that I am no lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you want more to read, I recommend the license recommendations maintained by the Free Software Foundation https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html Personally, I believe free and open source software is the future and we should work towards making it advantageous to become part of this "movement" (so: choose GPL!) :) |
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The second paragraph made it sound like I recommend using a CLA to allow arbitrary relicensing of contributions, which I believe is not well-regarded in the open source community because it allows you to make code contributions of others proprietary. In reality you do not need a CLA since you will probably only accept contributions under the same license as yours so you do not need to relicense them. However if you want to keep the option of changing the license later, you may use a CLA restricting yourself to specific license changes. |
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I like the spirit and aim of the GPL licenses, personally. In my experience, though, working on the private side of things, the GPL licenses are radioactive when it comes to adoption in companies. I suspect businesses will in general avoid GPL-licensed libraries if possible if it requires linking to them with their own code, unless, perhaps, they have a big open-source group already up and running. That seems like a significant pool of potential contributors to shut out should this project gain traction. For my own personal projects I use MIT. Much of the software I see and interact with in the Rust space is MIT or Apache 2 or dual licensed. |
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From @jaytaph's blog post, becoming the dominant browser isn't the goal of this project. I also think that an extension of their ideals include preventing companies from taking advantage of open-source to increase their profits. Based on how open-source has worked, most companies won't contribute back even if they like the software.
We're in this situation that xkcd explains perfectly: https://xkcd.com/2347/ I don't think making this licensed under MIT will bring significantly more contributors or funding when much larger libraries and applications already have difficulties getting either of these. |
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I don't disagree. You make good points. I do think there's a tension that would come into play if at some point this project were to gain traction; one might be safe in assuming it will not, although it's clear that there's a real interest in something like this regardless. And Linux, with its GPL, was initiated way back when under similar circumstances. But the GPL does not come without its cost, as everyone in this thread seems to appreciate. To add to the question of developer participation, there is also the sense of going against the grain by having a GPL project in a predominantly MIT/Apache 2 ecosystem (Rust's ecosystem). In the final analysis, I think the decision will come down to how @jaytaph will want to balance all of these competing priorities and possibilities. I do not see the decision as cut and dry one way or another, and I'll be happy to contribute under most of the licenses discussed in this thread. |
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The most popular license which aligns to your requirements the most is GPLv3+. And I really hopes we get a browser written in GPL rather than permissive license. We have seen this with chromium which is primarily open source but many polular derivative browsers like google chrome and edge are proprietary |
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Basically, because I have no idea's about the legal stuff, I pretty much always use MIT license for all projects I create. I'm wondering if this would be the right license, or if there are things to consider?
My goals for this project:
The problem with the last part I guess is that it would be difficult to establish this without restricting things too much goal 1 and 2. What about an (paid) application that uses the gosub-engine for displaying html markup?
I'm curious what would be the best way to deal with this, as I can image it would be much harder to do changes in the licensing later on if the project gets a lot bigger.
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