>From the point of view of npm, you can use whatever license you like. The virality of *GPL licenses as node modules has never been tested in court, so it's unclear what the ramifications are. But you can even publish stuff to npm with a license that says "You may not use this for any purpose unless you send me a check for US$5000, and you may only run it on computers that have unicorn stickers on their case."
What follows is strictly personal preference, and not the official word of Node or npm or Joyent or anything else. If you disagree, that's fine, but you probably won't convince me otherwise, nor do you need to, because we can all coexist, and disagreement is a part of a healthy vibrant ecosystem. >From the point of view of isaacs the node user, I'd rather not BE that court test test, and I care a lot about my freedom to make my code unfree if I choose, so if your module is proprietary or copyleft of any sort, I won't use it. If it's AGPL, not only won't I use it, but I'll laugh at you, because the AGPL is insane. In my opinion, the best options are BSD, MIT, and Apache2, because freedom is not about telling other people what to do. The BSD and MIT licenses are functionally equivalent, but I live near Berkeley, so that's why I use BSD instead of MIT. (I used to use MIT for everything before moving to the East Bay, because I grew up in New England.) Apache2 has much more thorough coverage of patents and other IP stuff, but I dislike it because it's so long and tedious, and I distrust long legal documents for the same reason that I distrust large programs. You should use it if you care about patent issues, or if you like pink feathers. On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 6:21 AM, Nuno Job <[email protected]> wrote: > What if all the top 100 npm maintainers changed everything in npm to gpl? > Would it still be poison then? That would never ever happen, Nuno, you know that :) I do personally think that the GPL is a blight on a programming community, and I love that Node is much more OSS than free-as-in-beards. But yeah, it's the author's prerogative. (You could still use previous versions that were released under the free licenses.) > Ps. Another topic of discussion would be how the only way to make money in > open source is support. Well, you and I both make money in open source, and not just by doing support. -- 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
