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Choosing Open Source License Wisely🤔

Kingkor Roy Tirtho on January 16, 2022

Licenses are really important part of a project. It’s one of those protector that’ll make sure no creation of one is used by another for self-profi...
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anisbarghouthi profile image
Anis-Barghouthi

There is no such thing as the OpenSourceFoundation, there is the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, these are separate non-profit organisations, the term "Free Software" is coined and defined by the FSF (see gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html), while the term "Open-Source" is defined by the OSI (see opensource.org/osd).
Although both of these terms, in most cases, refer to more or less the same thing, there are some differences that you can find in this article:
gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-mis...

The opposite term for both of these is "Proprietary Software" or "Non-Free Software".

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Kingkor Roy Tirtho

Thanks for the info. I thought OpenSourceFoundation & OpenSourceInitiative refers to same but now looks like not

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Hélio oliveira

No one will mention the WTFPL? 🤣

Anyway thank you for the article. The BSD-4 was exactly what I was looking for.

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૮༼⚆︿⚆༽つ

Some resource and article by blueoakcouncil.org might help.
Also check their premissive and copyleft license list categorization.

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Kingkor Roy Tirtho

Great resource. TY for sharing

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Dynnammo • Edited

Great article, thanks. It's hard to give an exhaustive list of all available OS licenses, but I'd like to add the Affero GPL License, recognized by the Open Source Initiative. I see it very much in recents among open-source projects. It add a particular clause of enforcing developers to publish their modifications. The idea behind it is to address the flaw you describe at the end of the article, which is basically take profit of the software, modify it internally without having the need to make these changes available to the public.

Again, warm thanks for this article. It sums up the subject very well 👏

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Bence Szabo

Good and timely writing! BSD4 seems like a vey nice choice!

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P Giri Kishore

Question: Can I use a tool/framework released under GNU GPL license to build a non commercial application in my organisation?

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Alessandro (Ale) Segala

The GPL doesn't forbid any use. The people who wrote the GPL license (Stallman and the FSF) have always been concerned about their ability to modify the software they are running, not preventing commercial use.

What the GPL requires is that if you distribute an application that contains GPL'd code (e.g. a library) in binary form (outside of your organization), then you ALSO must make the source code of the entire app available under the GPL license. Corollaries:

  1. If your app isn't distributed (outside of your organization), then you don't need to release the source code
  2. It's ok to make people pay for getting the binary form of the app. But you must also make the source code available under GPL license (and know that people can re-distribute that).

(Note: I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice)

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Kingkor Roy Tirtho

Yes, you can. But your commercial application have to be licensed under a GPL/GPL compatible license

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Kavindu Santhusa

There is another license named Unlicense. A crazy name but it exists.

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Kendra Wing

Great article. Appreciate your research & knowledge 👍.

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Bernd Wechner

The Hippocratic License is worth a mention IMHO.

firstdonoharm.dev/

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Paweł Świątkowski

This is a nice comparison. I've been using MIT because it's kinda default in Ruby ecosystem, but maybe I'd consider switching to another.

I also like Beerware license ;)

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Kingkor Roy Tirtho

Beerware Awesome

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Olivier

Cool stuff, thanks for sharing

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Tammy

I use leftcopy.org just because I think large companies are the worst offenders at freeloading.

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tankerguy1917

Question: When is says to use your full name, would I have to use my legal name, or could I use an alias, such as tankerguy1917, as my name, to help keep my identity a secret?

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Kingkor Roy Tirtho

I don't know this for sure. But I guess one can do that
But I'd recommend licenses that do not mention the author's name such as GPL/Apache-2.0

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Leon

I prefer 0BSD. It is the most simple, short, straightforward license.

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Jonny Eom

A very helpful read. Thanks! Didn't know how nice BSD-4 was

I've always used this site for my projects.
choosealicense.com/