[OSGeo-Discuss] The importance of a project's license

Landon Blake sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com
Fri Jul 27 07:05:59 PDT 2012


FYI: I release all of the code for my projects under the GPL and LGPL,
and have no plans on switching for my projects. So the licenses aren't
dead quite yet. :]

I think there is a tradeoff in the licensing decision between the
greater adoption that comes with a "weaker" license, and the stricter
adherence to open source principles that come with a "stronger"
license. (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)

I'm not making a statement about which license is better for OSGeo
Projects, I'm just making a general statement. I personally feel the
principles in the GPL and LGPL are more important than wider adoption
for my projects. But I'm just a hobby programmer.

There is one more thing to think about before changing the license on
a project. There may be programmers that favor contributions to
projects licensed under the GPL/LGPL, and consider a project's license
when determining where to dedicate their resources. I know OSGeo has
the right to change the licensing, but I believe there should be a
very strong case for doing so. It is, to a certain extent, changing
the rules after the game has started.

Landon




On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Mr. Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 27, 2012, at 9:08 AM, Andrew Ross <andrew.ross at eclipse.org> wrote:
>
>> BSD, MIT, Apache wouldn't have this issue - at the expense of not having the weak copyleft. Basically people can take the code and do what they wish with it.
>
>
> +1
>
>
> --
> Puneet Kishor
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss



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