On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Joseph Carter wrote: > Okay guys, how about a few suggestions?
Well, the obvious answer is that you can LGPL it, and add the restriction that the combined work must be licensed under a license that either is a) OSI-Approved Open Source (as found on www.opensource.org) or b) matches the Open Source Definition (as found on www.opensource.org) (Stallman in general doesn't like amendments to his licenses, though if it increases the amount of code thats forced to be published he may be happy, though of course his opinion is you should GPL it.) The latter may be harder to enforce than the former, if someone uses a new license that they claim conforms but hasn't been cetified. The quandry, though, is that if you're trying to prevent linking with non-open-source projects, this probably won't help you, since open source licenses themselves usually allow for some form of linking with non-open-source software. BSD/MIT/Apache, MPL, etc... the first-order derivitive might have to be open-source, but does that mean the second-order derivative would be? Certainly the first-order LGPL/OSL parts would be, but not the whole. If you want infinite virality, i.e. every derivative must be "open-source", then the GPL may be what you want anyways. Brian