Our company has been using a commercial development environment that provides the infrastructure for developing interactive web applications. Over several years, we have developed an object-oriented framework that can be used in conjunction with the commercial product, and greatly enhances developers' ability to create web applications.
In lieu of attempting to market this framework commercially, we are seriously considering making it available as open source. I have been researching for the right license to use, should we decide to do this. Our goals are: a) Make the framework itself available to other developers. b) Encourage contributions to the framework by other developers. c) (Key) Allow developers (including us) to create web applications that use the framework, but where the final applications can be *either* open source *or* proprietary. We have no experience with creating software licenses of any type, and thus are looking for advice. Based on our review of open source information we have found, our preliminary conclusions are: 1. Clearly the GPL is out for several reasons. 2. The LGPL looks closer to what we want, but it is very lengthy compared to other open source licenses, and it uses technical terms like "linking" and "executables" that strike me as too specific. (Ex: If you use "late binding", can you avoid license terms that refer to "linking"?) 3. The Modfied BSD and/or MIT license appear to be the closest to what we are looking for. Thanks in advance for any advice, -- Randy -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
