Re: Patch Licensing Terms

[hgualandi@...]

> I want to use the Creative Commons[1] licensing scheme but wonder about
> the "Share Alike" provision.

The keyword you are looking for is "copyleft"[1][2]. The "Share Alike"
name is unique to the Creative Common licenses.

As Jonathan pointed out in another reply, the Creative Commons licenses
are not suitable for source code. A better copyleft license for source
code would be the GNU GPL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
[2] https://copyleft.org/

> The Lua license makes no stipulations about having to open-source any
> modified versions of the source.

Yes. These non-copyleft open-source licenses are known as "permissive"
licenses.

> when I do release the language I need to decide between the
> Creative Commons Attribution Only license, or the Share Alike version.

If you want, you are allowed to create a GPL-licensed derived work that is
based on a MIT-licensed original work, as long as you continue to respect
the terms of the original license. However, there are some downsides to
changing the license like this.

The first one is that some people use Lua in a context that is
incompatible with a copyleft license and they won't be able to use your
copylefted derived language implementation. You will need to balance your
commitment to copyleft with your desire for wider adoption.

Another issue is that the Lua authors won't be able to use any of the
GPL-licensed patches in the main Lua project, unless you re-release them
under the more permissive MIT license. For Lua this is not a big issue
because its authors don't tend to directly apply "power patches" from the
community anyway but this barrier for collaboration can be a big pain
point in other open source projects.

> I guess I am just looking for opinions between the Attribution Only vs
> the Share Alike provisions of the Creative Commons Open Source License.

Copyleft vs non-copyleft discussions go way back in the open-source
community and is the sort of thing that can spawn long threads full of
people talking past each other. Not that I would expect this in this
mailing list though :)

-- Hugo