On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 7:29 PM, David Herron <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm curious about the preferred license for modules that are distributed
> through the npmjs.org repository


We discussed this a bit at NodeConf summer camp this year, and the
consensus was pretty strongly in favor of BSD or MIT licenses, or at least
pretty liberal, commercial-use friendly licenses (including the Perl and
Apache licenses).

In particular is there any legal barrier to using GPL in such modules?
>
> As far as I understand it, the legal barrier would be whether a module
> which uses a GPL'd module is derivative of that module.  I don't think that
> it would be, but then the LGPL license does exist for a reason.
>

Isaac can speak to this more authoritatively than I can, but npm itself
prescribes / proscribes no particular licenses. You could attach GPL3
licenses to your modules if you wanted, but uptake would probably be
hampered, especially if there were some kind of associated Canonical-style
contributor's agreement. Node is still pretty much the wild west, and it's
tough to say if today's random hack project might not become tomorrow's
startup idea, and I think most devs want to keep their options open.

F

-- 
Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/
Posting guidelines: 
https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "nodejs" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en

Reply via email to