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Licenses are boring but you really need one! (distractedmind.home.blog)

submitted 4 days ago by snaggen to c/programming

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

A good reason to pick GPL is if you want to allow GPL software to integrate yours and you don't care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn't a server).

CC0 might be a good fit for trivial template repos where you don't want to burden downstream projects with having to include copyright notices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

you don’t care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn’t a server).

I've been thinking about this recently... Let's say you develop some local CLI. You think it's not a server, so you license as GPL.

Later someone comes and offers your CLI as SaSS. They write the server piece that just calls your local CLI on their server and pipes the input and output between the user.

So... should you always prefer AGPL over GPL?

[–] JackbyDev 2 points 4 days ago

I have thought about this a lot and done some research on it. Bear in mind, I'm far from an expert, just a curious dev, but I've found no reasons to favor GPL over AGPL when AGPL exists. I personally see AGPL as closing a loophole GPL didn't think of.

One thing I'd wondered if if maybe AGPL hasn't been tested in court. It has. Not as much as GPL, and I don't remember if it specifically was the online part, but I definitely found at least one court case involving AGPL code.

[–] JackbyDev 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Absolutely not! Avoid CC0! Stop spreading bad information. If you want a public domain dedication with fallback permissive license the best choice is (sadly) The Unlicense. It is the only public domain dedication with fallback permissive license approved by both FSF and OSI. It's unfortunate because The Unlicense is still a crayon license.

If you don't want to burden some stream projects with including copyright notices, just don't enforce it if you find people who forgot.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0

If you want to release your non-software work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0. For works of software it is not recommended, as CC0 has a term expressly stating it does not grant you any patent licenses.

Because of this lack of patent grant, we encourage you to be careful about using software under this license; you should first consider whether the licensor might want to sue you for patent infringement. If the developer is refusing users patent licenses, the program is in effect a trap for users and users should avoid the program.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"just don't enforce it" probably isn't enough for most companies and projects

[–] JackbyDev 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If your company won't let you use MIT licensed software I don't know what to tell ya. If your company won't let you use MIT code, which FSF and OSI endorse, but will let you use CC0 code, which FSF and OSI do not endorse, then I really don't know what to tell ya.

[–] Colloidal 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

AGPL and GPL v3 are explicitly compatible, IIRC. You can run into some trouble with v2.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What I mean is that you (IIUC) can't use an AGPL library in a GPL app without relicensing the whole thing to AGPL. For many larger projects relicensing is a huge hassle and often a non-starter if there aren't very good reasons for it.

[–] Colloidal 1 points 4 days ago

You're right, the explicit permission is only the other way around.