Re: What is the best license to use for open source software?

[Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi>]

5.1.2015, 17:56, Maciej Sobczak kirjoitti:
>
>> OK, I have seen the BSD license before, I will take a closer look
>> at it.
>
> I have read the GPL flame with great interest (as usual, because it
> seems to be a periodic phenomenon), but I think the discussion would
> not be complete if you are left with only two choices. Some time ago
> the C++ community (yes, the guys everybody hates here and which
> happened to do lots of things just right ;-) ) came up with the Boost
> license, which was explicitly intended to support both open- and
> closed-source software. The community that relies on this license is
> now very large, which also means that its legal meaning is well
> established. For detailed wording see here:
>
> http://opensource.org/licenses/bsl1.0.html
>

There are also other permissive open source licenses which supports open
and closed source software.

Ruby and JavaScript projects many times use MIT license.
For example, see Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/) or JQuery
(https://jquery.org/license/).

Java and JVM -based projects often use Eclipse License.
Examples: Eclipse IDE itself, Clojure (http://clojure.org/license).

Personally, I prefer ISC license (basically simplified BSD), which comes
from Internet Software Consortium (home for BIND & stuff).
Example: OpenBSD; Ahven, my unit testing library for Ada
http://www.ahven-framework.org/LICENSE.txt

There are some wording differences between these licenses (Boost, MIT,
Eclipse, ISC), but generally they are compatible with each other and you
can include the code to closed source software without needing to
release the source code. (Of course, there might be some exceptions;
check the licenses first before combining code with different licenses.)

Yours,
  Tero