From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!gandalf.srv.welterde.de!news.jacob-sparre.dk!loke.jacob-sparre.dk!pnx.dk!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tero Koskinen Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: What is the best license to use for open source software? Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 18:52:44 +0200 Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation Message-ID: References: <0Kgqw.953330$_k.685364@fx16.iad> <199c826a-923e-497f-a8e2-9e732c8a5665@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 178-55-164-33.bb.dnainternet.fi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: loke.gir.dk 1420476769 7664 178.55.164.33 (5 Jan 2015 16:52:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@jacob-sparre.dk NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 16:52:49 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.3.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: number.nntp.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:191679 Date: 2015-01-05T18:52:44+02:00 List-Id: 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