A specific case: when I worked at Adobe, we could not use any open source library whose license was not one of a standard set of pre-approved licenses. During a license audit (oh joy!) I had to approach a couple of OSS projects we had started to use in order to persuade them to change their license to one of the approved ones.
(and it also led us to request one project change from LGPL to something more "friendly" to corporate use since that project generated code that merged with your own code and it was a grey area how exactly that merged code would be affected by LGPL - lawyers are interesting creatures and can be pedantic beyond anything we software developers might consider reasonable) It's much more likely however that such companies would simply discount your library than ask you to change the license, so you may never be asked that question: your library will just be quietly ignored :) Sean On May 3, 2014, at 7:10 AM, James Reeves <ja...@booleanknot.com> wrote: > Some software companies, particularly larger ones, are careful about the > licenses of software they use in their products. With a standard open source > license it's often easy to get approval, because licenses like MIT are very > common. > > Software with a custom license is trickier, because it's not a case of > rubber-stamping a license known to be safe. Someone with legal training would > have to look over the license and certify it as being safe to use. > > This also applies to dependencies. If a library happens to use packthread, > then suddenly that library becomes legally suspect as well. Is MIT compatible > with your license? Is EPL? > > The benefit to using an existing open source license is that their legal > position is clear. Even though your license is simple, IANAL, so I wouldn't > be able to say for sure there's no hidden subtlety there that might impact my > project if I use it. It may be that there will never be an issue, but why > should I risk it? > > - James > > > On 3 May 2014 13:46, Jason Felice <jason.m.fel...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi! > > I'm pretty familiar with legal license stuff (though IANAL). I wouldn't mind > considering changing it at the point where someone wants to use it but can't > - because that would carry with it a specific reason we can think about. > > -Jason >
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