Picking a license

[Lie Ryan]

On 05/12/10 07:02, Patrick Maupin wrote:
> On May 11, 9:00 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>> On 11 Mai, 15:00, Lie Ryan <lie.1... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Come on, 99%  of the projects released under GPL did so because they
>>> don't want to learn much about the law; they just need to release it
>>> under a certain license so their users have some legal certainty.
>>
>> Yes, this is frequently the case. And the GPL does offer some
>> certainty that various permissive licences do not.
> 
> Huh? Permissive licenses offer much better certainty for someone
> attempting a creative mash-up.  Different versions of the Apache
> license don't conflict with each other.  If I use an MIT-licensed
> component, it doesn't attempt to make me offer my whole work under
> MIT.

Legal certainty as in, imagine if you released a piece of code, and use
this as the license:

"Feel free to use the code"

Then some other programmers see it, and use it in their project. The
original author then sued them because he actually intended the code to
be linked to, not copied pasted into another code base.

Then he modified the license to sound:

"Feel free to link, include, or use the code"

Then some other programmers see the code, and modified it to fit their
purpose. The original author then sued them because he only intended the
code to be "used unchanged" not "modified".


"Feel free to link, include, use, or modify the code"

Then some other programmers see the code, and used it in some commercial
project. The original author then sued them because he only intended the
code to be used in open source projects.


Lather, Rinse, Repeat and you get twenty page long license like GPL or
OWL[*]. By this time, the other programmer have learnt not to use code
with such uncertain license and the original author would either have
taken a law degree or learn to use a well-known licenses (GPL or
whatever) instead of writing his own.

The other programmer would always find a loophole in such ad-hoc
license, inadvertantly or otherwise. If  the original author used GPL
(or OWL), the other programmer knows exactly when their use case is
protected by GPL/OWL (i.e. even if the original author later found that
he disagrees with a certain clause in the license he choose, it then
becomes his fault for choosing it; the other programmer's use case is
protected by the license and thus he have the legal certainty).

[*] OWL: other well-known license

As a plus, using a well-known license means the other programmer also
don't need to hire a lawyer to determine whether he can use your code.
The other programmer sees GPL and remembers that FSF listed the license
he's using as GPL-compatible, he knows immediately he can use the code
without reading the full text of GPL. The other programmer sees some
Apache and he remembers previously he had used another Apache-licensed
code and knows immediately that he can use this other Apache project. If
everyone writes their own license, then this knowledge reuse wouldn't be
possible.

>> Well, that's always an option as well, but at the same time, there are
>> people willing to pursue licence violations, and these people have
>> done so successfully. There's no need to make an impassioned argument
>> for apathy, though. Some people do wish to dictate what others can do
>> with their work.
> 
> Oh, I get it.  You were discussing the certainty that an author can
> control what downstream users do with the software to some extent.
> Yes, I fully agree.  The GPL is for angry idealists who have an easily
> outraged sense of justice, who don't have enough real problems to work
> on.

The point is, GPL (and OWL) is for programmers who just don't care about
the legal stuffs and would want to spend more time writing code than
writing license.