licensing: GPLv2, v3, and Apache

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

On Dec 28, 2007 6:37 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
>
> I negotiated with a lot of companies as co-founder of Cygnus, which
> develops and supports free software for companies that use it.  (It's
> now part of Red Hat.)  Licensing your code under Apache, GPLv2,
> GPLv2+, or GPLv3+ protects the "Four Freedoms" of its users and
> developers; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html .  The
> practical difference is that later, people who modify GPL software
> can't take it proprietary.

Well this has some otehr practical implications.  You might actually
want to support proprietary development for various reasons.

We licensed the Project Darkstar server under GPL because we want the
server technology itself to remain totally open and any improvements
be contributed back to the community.  However we licensed the client
API code BSD because we want the industry to feel free to write
commercial games with it.

We also are  looking at dual licensing because some commercial users
*want* a commercial license for variosu business reasons.  Keep that
in mind, no matter what kind of license you release the code under,
you retain all rights (assumign you don't actually give them away).
Including the right to license it under other terms any time you like.

This is the big difference between an Open Source license and a Public
Domain release.  The latter gives away all rights and anybody can do
anything with it.

Myself, I used to write a lot of Public Domain code.  Now, I write a
lot of BSD licensed code because its almost as free but lets me hold
on to the final rights.
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