Whilst I’m busy trying to upload PowerTime into Google Code the hairy issue of which software licence to use cropped up.
Open source licences scare the living daylights out of me especially the GNU ones.
I like copyleft licences because whatever rights I grant to the user have to be provided by anybody else further down the line. The only problem being that there’s a lot of confusion, especially in proprietary software circles, about what the rights and responsibilities are.
One problem is, can code utilising both .NET and/or PowerShell be GPL’ed at all? Now, my understanding is that it can because both .NET and PowerShell are “System Libraries” and so are effectively exempted from the GPL. An example given in the GPL FAQ seems to cover this. Both .NET and PowerShell are supplied with the Windows operating system, though that depends largely upon which version of Windows. Some older versions of Windows were released before more recent releases of .NET and so don’t tend to install it. Same with PowerShell. Newer releases of Windows install both as part of the operating system.
BSD style licences don’t contain a copyleft element and are the most permissive. You can basically do whatever you like with a BSD licenced project. Projects like Apache and FreeBSD are licenced using BSD style licences.
From a developer point of view, having the rights to the source code potentially being stripped away by an intermediary bothers me. I want everybody who uses PowerTime to have the same rights. Whilst it is more a theoretical risk it is still possible.
Time will tell I guess…we are flexible. If users are put off by the GPL licence then we’ll have to revisit the licencing issue.
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The rise and rise of the GPL would be more than enough comfort for me.
IANAL but I think you are right about the (binary) library and the GPL, in fact this is oone of the reasons that the LGPL came about from what I recall. There is a pretty good plain-English description of GPL vs LGPL on the Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGPL
If you also consider that Sun have chosen the GPL for Java, and are looking like they will do so for OpenSolaris, when they could have used their own own OSS license (CDDL) I think that speaks very loudly.
Good luck with your project.
(Now all you need to do is make it cross-platform
)
@Alan – we’ve gone with GPL v3…