From: Gregory Brown Date: 2007-04-01T03:47:16+09:00 Subject: Yet another licensing argument (was: New presentation on Ruby) On 3/31/07, Chad Perrin wrote: > > >Good for you. > > > > No need to be rude. > > Funny -- "Good for you." was my way of saying "No need to be rude." I apologize if what I said seemed harsh. That was not the intention. > > >1. I tend to dual-license whenever anyone really wants it. > > > > Dual licensing is an acceptable way to provide both your terms and a > > more standard set of terms, but it's not ideal. It means if I want to > > contribute back to you, I still need to understand your home grown > > license, which, at least in my case, means you'd be less likely to see > > contributions from me. > > So sorry. If I don't like the license you'd rather use, it's not the > license I'm going to use. That's pretty much tautological. That's not what I mean. I mean that if you dual license something, it does create a complication. For example, anyone out there using license of Ruby, if you've broken GPL compatibility in your distribution by accepting GPL incompatible patches, well, you can't meaningfully use the same distribution terms as Ruby 1.8. Ironically, same goes if you've accepted patched under the GPL itself. Dual licensing tells the user they have a choice, but the distributor needs to maintain compliance with *both* of the terms they distribute under. Someone please correct me on this if I'm wrong, because I've had this interpretation for a while. So what I'm saying is, I'd use code you wrote if it were under a disjunctive license with the MIT license and the License Of The Flying Oak Tree, because I'd just ignore the latter and treat it as if it were under MIT. But for me to patch back, and understand what rights I have to that work, I'd need to understand License Of The Flying Oak Tree, and unless I *really* care, I might not be inclined to go read that, so you might lose my patch. Of course, I could also just offer it back under MIT or some other compatibility, but then you'd be having to keep track of all these different patch licenses, which sucks! So my point is that if you use standard licenses, you avoid this confusion. That to me is more important than bickering over wording issues. If you're in the case where you have serious issues with the existing licenses out there, maybe you're being sensible by rolling your own, and being kind by dual licensing. But it seems to me these cases are more rare than others, and when they do happen, someone should be notified upstream of your concerns. Have you contacted CC about your issues with their terms? > > >2. I choose the license I do specifically because I often don't care to > > >"live with" other extant licenses. It wasn't a capricious decision. It > > >was a decision born of frustration. In any case, the license I created > > >was designed with simplicity in mind -- and if you can get along with > > >Creative Common license term legal text (byzantine and stilted phrasing) > > >then you'll have no problem with what I use. > > > > Except that I don't want yet another license to remember. > > What, exactly, is this supposed to mean to my lack of satisfaction with > certain other licenses? I don't know. It's certainly a hard problem. I'm not terribly happy with most licenses, either. If I were working on end-user apps or fringe stuff, I'd probably be less concerned with the potential confusion of self-created licenses. However, most of my work tends to need to play nice in a lot of places, be used by a lot of people with varying opinions about stuff, and generally be diplomatic about its licensing. So I choose LoR for all my Ruby work, similar arrangements in other languages, and CC by SA for documentation. This seems to work for me. Of course, like anything else, YMMV