Re: Patch Licensing Terms

[Paige DePol <lual@...>]

hgualandi@inf.puc-rio.br wrote:

>> 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.

Ah yes, I had heard of that term before... I just didn't know exactly what it
meant, but upon further reading I now do. The realm of open-source licensing
is just not something I have looked into in much detail so I appreciate your
feedback on the matter! :)


> 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.
> 
> 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.

These are very valid points. I personally love open source software and
would hope that everyone would release any changes made to the original
source they obtained. However, as you rightly point out, this is not always
a possible situation. I think I would prefer to keep my patches and language
derivative as compatible with the original Lua license as possible.


>> 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 :)

It does seem that people take licensing of open source as seriously as
any ideology... but I want to avoid those types of conversations whenever
possible! Thank you for your reply, you have provided some very salient
points and have helped me to make a decision.

At this time I will simply propagate the Lua MIT license to my own works
as they pertain to both my patches for vanilla Lua and for my derivative
language. This way people can use the patches and/or the language as they
see fit and maybe someday I will see an attribution somewhere! :)

~Paige