There is no "best choice" in licensing, just right for the right situation. I like the simplicity of the apache 2.0 license<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html>which is mainly BSD in spirit plus attribution.
While GPL is more pure "open source" ideologically. Businesses tend to back away from using GPL based software because they can't repackage it and distribute it without the source, which is a non-starter for most businesses. For my own projects, I would rather be less ideological so that businesses are more interested in using it rather than grinding a philosophical ax at the expense of my own software project's usage. Another perspective is that in some situations it might not matter one little bit what license you choose. Very few licenses guard against this licensing gotcha: If the source is on the internet, I can download, modify, and mash up your code to create some type of service based website. Since I never actually distribute the code to the customer, I just sell a service online all of the attribution, and the what is open stays open arguments go out the window. Here I can take something open, modify it in an awesome way, and since I never distribute it I never have to share my derivative changes thereby preventing the GPL project from benefitting from my extensions. That is a pretty easy way to sidestep any of these licenses. Brian On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 7:58 AM, Alistair Grant <akgrant0...@gmail.com>wrote: > It will partly depend on who you would like to be able to use your code. > > The corporate mandate at my previous employer, a very large software > company, was "No GPL". LGPL was tolerated, but not encouraged. The reason > for the mandate was that GPL required the user to also make their code > available, which is not what this software company wanted. This was a few > years ago, so the situation may have changed, but I'd expect it hasn't. > > Cheers, > Alistair > > > On 13/05/11 13:34, Thomas Weholt wrote: > > I've released three django-related packages the last few months, all > under the GPL license. Recently somebody asked me about my license > choice; "Why not BSD, the same as django?". My reason for choosing GPL > is based on the fact that I'm a strong supporter of free software as > defined by FSF and GPL is the de facto standard license for that. But > the question got me thinking and I wonder what kind of problems I > might run into using the GPL, and not the BSD license. > > Do people really care? Should I care? I think so. What do you people > think; How to choose a license and why? > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django users" group. > To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. > -- Brian Bouterse ITng Services -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
