On 21/01/13 21:31, David Ascher wrote: > There are two kinds of reasons motivating a copyleft requirement in a > software release: moral ones, and pragmatic ones. <snip>
Your message overall is a cogent (as one would expect :-) outline of the pragmatist case. > In 2013, I have to say I find the copyleft clause much less > interesting or valuable, because: > > - open source has evolved, and IMO social pressure is a much more > effective way to build an actual community of contributors than > licensing restrictions Is this a straight either/or? Surely it's a "social pressure OR social pressure and licensing"? I think there are good examples, even in our space, of licensing working as a tool to encourage useful code publication. WebKit Core is LGPL, and Apple publishes its modifications to it on release in 2003. Other bits are BSD, and were only open-sourced when Apple decided it wanted to, which was in mid-2005. > - history (e.g. DVCS'es, github) has > shown (IMO) that encouraging forking ends up resulting in more code > being published than focusing on merging. That may well be true; however, to make it support your point you would need to show that copyleft-licensed code is less forked than non-copyleft code. > In addition, the MPL isn't a "trendy" license -- MIT, BSD, Apache are > all more widely / better understood. MPL2 is (IMO) much better, and > if we'd had a time machine and released MPL2 back in 1999 or whatnot, > the world might be different today, but pushing MPL2 externally at > this point doesn't feel high-value. The MPL is in the OSI's "Popular Licenses" list: http://opensource.org/licenses/index.html . We certainly saw uptake of the license outside Mozilla even for 1.1, and we think 2.0 fits rather nicely on the copyleft spectrum between Apache and LGPL. Still, I agree that we shouldn't push the MPL "because it's ours". We don't want licensing NIH. > Where I end up therefore is that picking a license that minimizes the > barrier to adoption & contribution is pretty high on my list of > criteria. I have no strong opinion w.r.t. MIT vs BSD vs Apache, as > in my experience they're often interchangeable in that pursuit. > YMMV, especially if the code has to integrate in an existing > community. Where on your list of criteria is "protect contributors against legal action"? If it's somewhere near the top, how much value do you place on the patent clauses in e.g. MPL and Apache? Gerv _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
