Many of the products in the Rails universe are available under the permissive MIT license, but this is an anomaly (and possibly a disaster waiting to happen; see below). The GNU GPL remains more widely used in the general open-source ecosystem, and the AGPL is essentially the GPL updated for web applications. Virtually any argument against the AGPL is also a valid argument against the GPL.
> The only reason insoshi exist is because of MIT lic, Ruby on Rails and > Ruby under Ruby license. It is of course your choice to choose the > license you prefer. True, but the same can be said for the many projects that use the GPL. Where would we be without the GNU tools, or Linux, or MySQL? I'd hazard to guess that upwards of 90% of production Rails apps run on Linux servers with a MySQL back-end. That's all GPL software, baby. > I beg to differ. Ruby on Rails is under MIT and its very popular as > far as I can tell there are dozens of other flagship products like > Apache HTTP server under similar license. Those aren't products produced by startups. Apache is produced by a nonprofit organization, and Rails itself is an incredible source of publicity for 37signals, which makes its money off of web applications written in Rails. I for one would love to see how they use Rails in those apps---I'm sure I could learn a lot---but their applications aren't open source. That isn't an accident. > So you are willing to leverage of other open source project but not > willing others to do so from your project? Anyone can use Insoshi if they want. They just have to release the combined source code under the AGPL as well. Again, the same issue holds for the GPL. Some people object to making licenses 'viral' in this sense, but the GPL was developed partially in reaction to bitter experiences with more permissive licenses; the X window system, for example, was released under the MIT license, and ended up being co-opted by commercial vendors that refused to release their modifications and improvements. By design, that can't happen with any GPL- or AGPL-licensed product, since modifications must also be released under the (A)GPL. If you think this viral requirement is unfair, I suggest concentrating your efforts on bigger targets than Insoshi (e.g., Linux or MySQL). > A simple request it would be a good idea to mention about your > licensing policy on the front page .. just like wordpress or ruby on > rails.. Open source is wide open-ended term up until you read the fine > print. A prominent LICENSE file comes with the source code, but I agree that it would be good to indicate the license information on the Insoshi home page, so I have added a license page (http://insoshi.com/license) to the main navigation bar. Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Insoshi developer site: http://dogfood.insoshi.com/ Insoshi documentation: http://docs.insoshi.com/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Insoshi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/insoshi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
