Hi! I have been looking at the various software licenses(again?) in order to determine which would be deemed appropriate by any software firm.
My intent is not to start an yet another fight over freedoms and which license is better. My idea is to make a suitable choice possible to the widest audience of people. After all, the aspirations of freedom in any side of life differs from people to people.
IMHO, one can assign various levels of freedom to each of these open source licenses, but strangely I cant find any site which helps a software firm decide the one best for it. The creativecommons.org website does this very well (http://creativecommons.org/license/) even though it is generally aimed at non-software licenses.
If I assign different levels of freedom in the following way:
1. Freedom to the customer: ------------------------ Includes freedom to modify the software for my own use either by in-house people or by third-party.Of course, the third-party doesnt have a license to work on the software for any purpose other than this customer.
Note that while microsoft provides the shared source option, it is an extra option to buy and can thus not be taken as a freedom that comes along with the product(unlike what they make it out to be).
Note that the software need not be available for public use. The developer provides this software directly to the customer.
Variations of this freedom would allow that the customer, once the product has been sold to it, can sell it - original or modified to anybody. Modifications may or may not be given back to the original developer.The copyright to the original software still resides with the original developer. Note that this is similar to public domain software, with the exception that only a purchasing customer can do so.
2. Freedom to customer and anybody: ------------------------------------------ The source is publicly available for anybody to use for personal or (as a variation) commercial use. Rest is the same as (1).
3. Freedom to the customer, everybody and community: ------------------------------------------------- The source is freely publicly available. Any commercial exploitation should also provide the same availability. Thus the community will always have all enhancements available to it.
In my opinion, GPL provides level (3), BSD provides (2) and if I am not wrong, early Unix licenses provided (1).
QPL, which I had been looking at lately, is a variation of (2).
My idea is that with a clear clasification like this, a businessman can decide on the level of conscience he is happy with ;) and which can reconcile with his business aspirations and business goals (like being product based or service based in approach) before deciding the license to source his software.
As an example, a product based businessman can be happy enough with level (1). This gives enough freedom to the stakeholder who might be the only one who really matters to him.
I know that this classification can be fine tuned and be made more clear, but I hope to get a general idea across to the people who intend to be conscientious businessmen.
Any comments?
- Sandip
-- Sandip Bhattacharya http://www.sandipb.net sandip at puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. http://www.puroga.com
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