On 11/08/2014 10:48 AM, Ben Finney wrote:
Mike Dewhirst <mi...@dewhirst.com.au> writes:
I'm getting near to open sourcing a Django project and have to choose
an appropriate license. Can anyone help me choose?
Thank you for working to release the software under free terms.
I have settled on the following requirements ...
1. Project source must be freely available for end users to view and
download and modify and further distribute to others
These are essential to free software.
2. But if user modified source is distributed the modified source must
be freely available for others to view and download and modify and be
subject to the identical license as the project source
This makes the license a “copyleftâ€: the recipient is free to
redistribute only under terms with all the same freedoms.
3. However, if the user modified source is kept in-house and not
further distributed the changed source may be kept private or offered
back to the project as a patch at the whim of that user.
Fine. It's not at all clear copyright even applies to modifications if
they're not redistributed to others; you can assume this is permitted in
any free software license.
4. Project (and user modified) source may be combined with proprietary
software but the project (or user mofified) source component remains
subject to the same license.
As you describe this, it is an oxymoron. Complying with the terms above
makes the work free, not proprietary. A free work distributed under
non-free terms (“proprietaryâ€) is not free.
My software will need to interface with unknown other systems on other
platforms than the server platform I provide. If someone else wants to
distribute their (unknown to me) system with mine interfaced, I don't
wish to prevent that. If the other user doesn't want to use my license
they have to dual-license and specify my license for my software. Their
license might be proprietary and their component might be closed source.
If they modify my source I want that to be freely available.
So I don't understand what it is you want with this. Either you want to
require redistributino under free terms, or you want further
restrictions to be allowed. Which?
I'm leaning towards the LGPL but would appreciate feedback from anyone
with contrary views.
Based on your stated requirements, I would advice you to license the
work under “GNU GPL version 3 or laterâ€, but you'll need to clarify what
appear to be incompatible constraints.
_______________________________________________
melbourne-pug mailing list
melbourne-pug@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pug
