Software licenses and releasing Python programs for review

[John J. Lee]

"poisondart" <poisondart985 at gmail.com> writes:
[...]
> Ultimately I desire two things from the license (but not limited to):
> - being able to distribute it freely, anybody can modify it
> - nobody is allowed to make profit from my code (other than myself)
[...]

If you believe it's feasible to get contributors to (literally) sign
over their copyright to you, consider dual GPL+commercial licensing.
Trolltech do this very successfully with their Qt GUI framework (they
also have educational licenses too, I believe, though the release of
Qt 4/Win under the GPL will presumably make those licenses redundant).

In general, people tend to find it very hard to get unpaid code
contributions if there are annoying restrictions such as prohibition
against commercial distribution of the code, which is one reason why
people pick BSD or GPL licenses.  Whatever you do, pick a standard,
well known license, simply because nobody has the time or inclination
to read somebody else's pet license.

(Of course, if the contributions you're most interested in aren't
copyrightable (comment on algorithms or scientific ideas, or
high-level feedback about the implementation of your code, for
example), all this may not be a big issue.)

Though they sometimes mix, the academic world is driven by different
motivations than the open source world, of course.  As someone from
the linguistics field, you're probably far better placed than we are
to know about the social environment in which your code will find
itself.  Unless there's another Linguistic Pythonista here ;-)


John