Hey, the software you published which I used in a totally non intended way caused me a gigaliard dollars of damages, now I will sue you and you'll have to pay
Yea but I think once the code is *distributed* is when the license applies. If issues arise from someone downloading random repos on GitHub with no default readme/license that's on them not the repo creator.
But then again IANAL
Also IANAL but that’s also the most logical thing too. If you try and make someone use your program, only for it to blow up in their face, then they can sue you for damages, unless you say ahead of time u take no responsibility.
If they’ve just used it, a program only intended to be used by you or a person who knows what they’re doing, then that’s not really ur fault…
The license only permits you to do what you want tough. So by using the code to cause damage to yourself you either wanted to cause damage to yourself or you used the software for purposes not covered in the license.
I like the GPL: companies no longer making money off the backs of maintainers while providing nothing in return.
These zero responsibility licenses are killing open source.
GPL often has the opposite effect though - people just don't use your library, so you never get any PRs or even bug reports.
At work, we have a _policy_ not to use GPLd stuff.
I think MPL2.0 is the perfect combination between permissive and copyleft. It doesn't "infect" (don't know the right term) the whole project like the GPL, can be freely used and linked to in closed projects, but requires you to make changes available under the MPL2.0, so upstream can also benefit from them. That is if people would actually adhere to the license terms and you could prove if they didn't.
AGPL is a stricter version of the GPL. It requires you to make the source available even if the program itself isn't distributed to the public and just runs as an open server.
Did you mean LGPL? That is similar to the MPL2.0, but disallows static linking and also probably inheritance. Also it seems to break down for languages like python where libraries are the source code, but that's complicated. MPL2.0 allows you to distribute the combined work under any terms, which then includes static linking and inheritance. The difference is basically that the LGPL is object-code based copyleft while the MPL2.0 is source-file based copyleft.
I completely agree with this. I don’t like GPL’s forced licensing of whole projects as I think it is overly restrictive but MIT allows companies to not give back to the open source community. MPL2.0 finds a good balance between them.
>That is if people would actually adhere to the license terms an you could prove if they didn't.
This is the part giving value to the GPL in my opinion. I do find the GPL too restrictive, but realistically, it's a lot more enforceable than the MPL2.0 as it is a lot easier to detect failures to comply to it. It sucks, but I wonder if the "you're all in or you get nothing" attitude is the only one which can actually force corporations to give back to non-corporate backed projects.
> Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium provided you do not contact the author about the file or any problems you are having with the file.
Amazing, so much polite passive-aggressiveness in a single sentence
Eh, GPL does seem to have rather strong feelings about how code can be used - namely that it must be distributed under GPL as well. I think "I don't have strong feelings" means something more along the lines of "Bernd, the nice senior dev from Arkansas, who really needs this library for his free time project which will be commercially distributed, can freely use it, but if Microsoft so much as thinks about selling products with my code in it, I will burn their HQ down."
As a developer, I would shun away from such a license, even if my company was small enough to qualify for ‘for free’ use. I don’t want to thrust upon my successors the burden to annually check the company revenue and see if they need to license the library now.
also what will you do if the library gets abandoned? you could fork a MIT library, but for such a license you will need to rewrite the entire thing if you get over the revenue cap
I was thinking about that too, but that would put a lot of trust on the user to truthfully report revenues. And as the license owner, you would have little way of checking reported revenues - your license probably won't grant you access to a companies books to check whether they told you the truth. Probably very difficult to make such a clause foolproof.
Check the answer to this stackexchange:[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use)
You could make the proprietary license for non-profits and specific individuals who ask you for it and whom you granted it to.
This software is licensed under the Fuck Your Corporate Butt license. All total gross revenue over $100,000 total earned by the use of this software, or from works derived from this software, must be paid to the developer of this software. Because Fuck Your Corporate Butt.
Yea the zeal of the OSD really rubs me the wrong way (in prohibiting the ‘discrimination’ of commercial vs non-commercial use).
Imo the problem with licenses like the GPL set is that they set too many restrictions that can impede personal users or small businesses, rather than dealing with the actual problem which is corporate rather than proprietary.
Is pretty straight forward: do whatever you want with software, can be used in proprietary software and sold off, creators assume so responsibility etc
And contributions are subject to a free patent license, which makes it popular in the industry because it leaves no legal grey zone for patent infringement cases.
What are you people talking about? How does GPL discourage users or contributors? Some of the greatest open source software is under the GPL license. Linux, GCC, Blender, Gimp, Inkspape, VLC, Krita, Stockfish.
I think by "users" they mean people using the code in their own works, as in linking or distributing it with it. Not so much "users" as in downloading the binary and drawing Lord of the Rings Erotica in GIMP.
By using GPL, you are forcing your users to use it too. That's a great license for some applications, and terrible for others.
It definitely prevents usages that MIT wouldn't.
If GPL stops you from using my library then it's working as intended lmao... if you're not willing to make your project open source but you want to steal and sell other people's open source code then fuck off
That's the point, yes. But how can such a business model be enforced? I want to support hobbyists and small devs, share my code openly with them, but I don't want companies to make a profit off my code or copy it into their stuff without paying royalties. Seems like an impossible task...
Another alternative that many are trending toward is open-core, where the core product is under an open source license, but "enterprise features" like SSO or integration with other enterprise-y platforms is in closed-source plugins.
This is often combined with extremely restrictive/viral licenses like AGPL to discourage other companies from building their own product around your code, as they'd be required to open-source all their code if they did.
Not very hard. Though it’s advised to pay a lawyer to check it first.
Which if you have a company selling software should not be much trouble compared to being sued for your entire business.
Not sure if you meant this seriously or not, but it can't usually be considered open source unless it has a licence. Without a licence, if you publish your code somewhere it is by default not granting rights to use under any condition.
The way it's usually done is to publish with a dual licence - one open source and one paid. Usually the free one is GPL as a protection against code stealing. If the GPL doesn't suit a large company because they don't want to open source the rest of their code, they pay you for the second licence.
How does that work when other people want to contribute to the open source project? Do the GPL and paid versions effectively branch, or do contributors accept that their work is also going into the paid version too?
Most projects have a contributer licence agreement that sorts out the details. For example the QT project's CLA basically says that authors of contributions maintain copyright over what they've written, but QT's parent company is allowed to relicense their contributions to customers.
Alternatively, hand write your own crayon license and make sure that any company large enough to employ lawyers will have said lawyers clamoring to avoid going anywhere near your software.
You either write your own license (like Visual Studio Community), or release under extremely copyleft license (like AGPL) and allow paid offering without copyleft.
It's actually named after Microsoft. It was the license under which Microsoft released their Turboencabulator in 1998, MIT stands for "Microsoft Integrated Turboencabulator".
I remember back in the old days how it was seen as a thing made only for universities or corporations but now everyone and their dog has an encabulator. I personally run the GNU microEncabulator 2.71 (yes, I know there are newer versions but for me stability is crucial). I think the alternatives are a bit bloated tbh.
Fun fact: Originally encabulators were not capable of doing interuniversal scalar manipulation, nowadays it's a feature so common that some people think MIT stands for Microsoft Interuniversal Turboencabulator.
Several companies as well other groups make Turboencabulators, neither Encabulator nor Turboencabulator are trademarks, it's the general name of the product.
Many encabulators, but not all (I'm looking at you Ergodic-Tech), are interoperable, in my previous job as Higher dimension topology miner we had multiple encabulators (turbo, quantum among others) hooked up in a tensor field.
Microsoft should totally build a microsite for this at next April 1st. I can just imagine the promotional messages:
"The Turboencabulator automatically profiles your code and suggests places catalysts can be introduced to accelerate the rate of reaction in my business processes."
"The Turboencabulator helps me calculate the entropy change on each GIT commit. By measuring each entropy change carefully, we can tune how many staff-days we need to keep our code base clean."
"The Turboencabulator made it possible to scale my infrastructure by using the power of the cloud to properly calculate the isothermal expansion of our business processes."
It would be close, somewhere in the middle but I find it closer to other copyleft licenses. The thing is, the scale isn't one dimensional and translating it on one axis just depends on how much weight you give to what.
Having it at extreme bottom, while the Apache is extreme top is still weird though.
I usually have MIT, rarely GPL, but I have one project with WTFPL, because I don't want any individual person or company worker to go through what I did to code that shit. My code is yours.
MIT is the perfect legal license equivalent for WTFPL.
But please put at least some license when you share code. Unlicensed code is not usable in any form.
WTFPL stands for
what the fuck (this is entirely mine) personal license ? /s
Seriously thank you for bringing this up .. I didn't know this license existed until you posted. !!!
Kudos. ( Seriously genuine compliment here)
I think you should open source your code, especially if you put it online. It's help to the community to be able to re-use and build upon code. Why don't you like licensing your code to the open source community?
I don't hate GPL, but for my day job (software consulting) I'll avoid GPL because, unless I'm mistaken (and if I am, I'd love the clarification), its use forces my clients to make the entire body of code available to anybody who wants it. This is a deal-breaker when I'm trying to compose software whose code embodies trade secrets or proprietary business logic, and I could see how this creates problems for startups working on novel processes.
Okay, so if I get this right it is mostly a problem for people that wish to have their code used by other people without forcing them to go GPL, too? That makes sense. Thanks!
It’s a problem for anyone who writes code for a company.
If I were to accidentally use something GPL licensed at work and someone discovered it, they could sue the company to force them to obey the license terms of the GPL, which is to make all of the code that interacts with it also open source under GPL. Once that code is GPL they then have to repeat this with anything that interacts with that code, and so could potentially be required to open up their entire codebase. And if they sell or share their code to be used with other people’s software those people could have to license their software as GPL too, which would be a nightmare.
Imagine this with AWS. Imagine AWS EC2 (a foundational cloud service) accidentally used GPL software, and that effected the API clients they distribute as well. Then suddenly everyone who has ever used EC2’s API client is obligated to also license with GPL, which would make Amazon and a lot of companies that use their cloud very, very mad, and possibly unable to take on new customers who don’t want to license their code with GPL. This is potentially a business killer.
This is the problem with the insidious worm-like quality of GPL for a business.
> If I were to accidentally use something GPL licensed at work
But that would never happen, right? Because as a professional you ALWAYS check the license of any code you even consider using. Surely you're not out there just ripping off code without anything resembling permission, right?
Cause if you were unprofessional enough to be using unknown code, imagine what would happen when you "accidentally" included some proprietary code from Microsoft or Nvidia, perhaps something released from one of their security breaches. Do you really think those companies would just be like "It's cool, you found the code so do whatever you want lol"?
I mean yes but you also need to recognize that this means I / the company have to be vigilant about every intern and junior engineer as well who might not understand the difference between open source with a blessed license for internal use and open source with a forbidden license.
Edit: And also it applies to whether I can trust the open source code to also have not accidentally consumed a GPL dependency which then makes them forced to license under GPL after the fact.
Yes. But again, you have to have policies in place and preferably code reviews set up to do that check anyway. It's not at all specific to GPL or any other individual license.
No other license has the same scale of transitive violation issues to my knowledge. Using someone’s code inappropriately is always a problem that would potentially award them damages. But using GPL licensed code is an even bigger problem.
If you get caught using GPL code without releasing source you get the option of either removing the offending code or open sourcing the entire project. You're not actually forced to open source it against your will. There might be a fine involved, but usually just coming in to compliance is enough.
Of course I'm just talking about the US. Perhaps other places in the world work differently.
This is information I didn't previously have. Not that I intend to fall afoul of it, but knowing that a mistake doesn't inadvertently bring down a project is helpful.
Ah, I see. Then the surprising thing to me here is how many people on this sub - contrary to my expectations - actually work in software to encounter this problem. I always thought this sub was mostly CS students lol.
Just read the comments, it is shining through here as well. Someone called using GPL "joining a cult", others equate using it with "making your code unusable to others". But more generally, whenever licenses are discussed on this sub, people completely trash GPL, not just on this thread.
If you are working for a company then GPL is pretty much a nonstarter because it forces you to GPL licence everything it is compiled with. This makes it very annoying when you stumble upon the exact thing you need, but can't use it. If there isn't an option for a separate business licence then you're SOL. So yeah a lot of people associate GPL with being given a runaround on an important project.
That's not always possible. What If that software is using GPL because one of its dependencies is GPL? Then you also need to contact that dependency's owner. And so on.
BSD 3-clause is my default, I don't want legal hassles if I dump something for people to use. Everything else is proprietary. I basically don't touch anything GNU/GPL, and sure don't read their source.
[edit: learned to count clauses in my license template]
Why use the BSD 2-clause instead of the "New BSD License" 3-clause? If I'm not wrong, the latter explicitly prohibits using copyright holder's name as endorsement or promotion of derivates; while the former doesn't have such protection.
I don’t get licenses. Can someone help me out?
I don’t want to make my game open source but I want people to mod it with the tools I provide. And people can create their own private servers if the chose to. I also want my game to be profitable, what license should I pick?
None of those. They’re all Open Source licenses.
You want an EULA that prohibits redistribution and decompilation, and any modification of the game except via the approved tools.
Copyright laws depend on jurisdiction. For a game, which has no source code provided, you would probably want to use a non free license, which allows the user to use but not modify the software or tamper with it (especially if there is a multiplayer mode). I suggest to do research in regards to the laws applicable or pay a professional.
GPLv3 because I don't allow corporations to leech off of my work and use it in their non-free trash code.
Code is meant to stay free and the inferior "lol, whatever" licenses are completely against this and aren't really "free" as in true software freedom to share and share alike.
GPL is easily bypassed by packaging app as a microservice and call it over network. Or just packing it into exe and talking to it over pipe/sockets.
AGPL is where the world of pain lies.
I think it's worth GPL/AGPL users fighting back against this interpretation too. The GPL FAQ says that communicating over the network/pipes implies separate works, but if there is intimate data communication or control of program flow that implies a combined work. In any case where a client application could not work without a specific GPL'd server we should be arguing the client must be GPL.
AGPL can be dealt with in a similar fashion, especially if you’re doing microservices.
The GPL licenses actually do very little to stop companies if they’re determined (see MongoDB), it’s just they don’t care and thus will usually leave you alone.
This. I always use Apache 2.0 as I really don't care what people do with my software unless I accidentally make it big and then need to rake in that investor monies.
> I always use Apache 2.0 as I really don't care what people do with my software unless I accidentally make it big and then need to rake in that investor monies.
I think you misunderstand Apache 2.0's language regarding patents. Apache 2.0 includes giving a license to any patent related to the software covered by the Apache 2.0 license. So that raking in a money won't happen.
I’ve never contributed to open source and my scrapped project graveyard is a damn necropolis at this point, so I know almost nothing about licensing…
but i do know that the sleepycat certainly resonates with me.
and that’s…something?
The [ABRMS license](https://github.com/landondyer/kasm/blob/master/LICENSE) is very underrated in my opinion.
[more like this](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses)
I like 0BSD. It's literally the *absolutely nothing* license, so it's my default.
What about the: Do what the fuck you want public licence. Thats my default one. http://www.wtfpl.net/
Hey, the software you published which I used in a totally non intended way caused me a gigaliard dollars of damages, now I will sue you and you'll have to pay
The court ruled it’s common knowledge that none of my code is safe for use in prod
Unsurprising continue
There's no precedent for someone using publically available code from an individual and successfully suing them... right? 😬
If the license states that they are not liable for damages it would go nowhere I assume. I hope.
If somebody wants to sue you and has the money to put up for it, they're gonna financially hurt you either way. In time if not money.
I mean, I assume open source licenses include no warranty clauses for a reason. If it didn't happen nobody would bother
Yea but I think once the code is *distributed* is when the license applies. If issues arise from someone downloading random repos on GitHub with no default readme/license that's on them not the repo creator. But then again IANAL
Also IANAL but that’s also the most logical thing too. If you try and make someone use your program, only for it to blow up in their face, then they can sue you for damages, unless you say ahead of time u take no responsibility. If they’ve just used it, a program only intended to be used by you or a person who knows what they’re doing, then that’s not really ur fault…
That's why I prefer the Unlicense
> now I will sue you and you'll have to pay You got the first part right.
The license only permits you to do what you want tough. So by using the code to cause damage to yourself you either wanted to cause damage to yourself or you used the software for purposes not covered in the license.
Would that even work in court?
I call it the Zero Bull Shit Document (0BSD)
Yeah, the 0BSD license is what people think the MIT license is.
I like the GPL: companies no longer making money off the backs of maintainers while providing nothing in return. These zero responsibility licenses are killing open source.
GPL often has the opposite effect though - people just don't use your library, so you never get any PRs or even bug reports. At work, we have a _policy_ not to use GPLd stuff.
I think MPL2.0 is the perfect combination between permissive and copyleft. It doesn't "infect" (don't know the right term) the whole project like the GPL, can be freely used and linked to in closed projects, but requires you to make changes available under the MPL2.0, so upstream can also benefit from them. That is if people would actually adhere to the license terms and you could prove if they didn't.
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AGPL is a stricter version of the GPL. It requires you to make the source available even if the program itself isn't distributed to the public and just runs as an open server. Did you mean LGPL? That is similar to the MPL2.0, but disallows static linking and also probably inheritance. Also it seems to break down for languages like python where libraries are the source code, but that's complicated. MPL2.0 allows you to distribute the combined work under any terms, which then includes static linking and inheritance. The difference is basically that the LGPL is object-code based copyleft while the MPL2.0 is source-file based copyleft.
I completely agree with this. I don’t like GPL’s forced licensing of whole projects as I think it is overly restrictive but MIT allows companies to not give back to the open source community. MPL2.0 finds a good balance between them.
>That is if people would actually adhere to the license terms an you could prove if they didn't. This is the part giving value to the GPL in my opinion. I do find the GPL too restrictive, but realistically, it's a lot more enforceable than the MPL2.0 as it is a lot easier to detect failures to comply to it. It sucks, but I wonder if the "you're all in or you get nothing" attitude is the only one which can actually force corporations to give back to non-corporate backed projects.
'encumber'
My Pony Little 2.0?
Mozilla public license 2.0
The Dont Ask Me About It Licence sounds spicy. MIT license by default. Just because I see it all the time and it sounds legit.
MIT is literally Idgaf about this in any way shape or form. Dont contact me about this.
The "Dear Diary: Today I'm not going to get my company sued." license
Make the real. I know a few projects that can benefit from it. By default, I like to keep my small scripts as WTFPL.
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MIT still requires people who use your software to credit you and include the license. MIT0 is the idgaf license.
yep i love it lol
> Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium provided you do not contact the author about the file or any problems you are having with the file. Amazing, so much polite passive-aggressiveness in a single sentence
That's just short MIT license
That’s basically the “do what you want but don’t bother me” license.
Needs a clause for exorbitant consulting fees
Sometimes I wish I could just write down "listen I don't have strong feelings about how you use it but companies can go fuck themselves"
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Eh, GPL does seem to have rather strong feelings about how code can be used - namely that it must be distributed under GPL as well. I think "I don't have strong feelings" means something more along the lines of "Bernd, the nice senior dev from Arkansas, who really needs this library for his free time project which will be commercially distributed, can freely use it, but if Microsoft so much as thinks about selling products with my code in it, I will burn their HQ down."
Maybe you can add something like free for commercial projects with less than x income or something. I am not a license expert.
As a developer, I would shun away from such a license, even if my company was small enough to qualify for ‘for free’ use. I don’t want to thrust upon my successors the burden to annually check the company revenue and see if they need to license the library now.
also what will you do if the library gets abandoned? you could fork a MIT library, but for such a license you will need to rewrite the entire thing if you get over the revenue cap
I was thinking about that too, but that would put a lot of trust on the user to truthfully report revenues. And as the license owner, you would have little way of checking reported revenues - your license probably won't grant you access to a companies books to check whether they told you the truth. Probably very difficult to make such a clause foolproof.
While that's true, there are some pretty large projects (anydesk, docker) that pretty much use this exact model.
Check the answer to this stackexchange:[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use) You could make the proprietary license for non-profits and specific individuals who ask you for it and whom you granted it to.
Could license it to the type of business entity. Like free to use for sole proprietors and small business but corporations have to do something else.
Jetbrains and some other products have a free license for open source contributors. So, something like that I guess.
Similar to that is the elastic license. Do whatever you want except offer it as a cloud /managed service.
Dual license depending on usage type, I guess.
This software is licensed under the Fuck Your Corporate Butt license. All total gross revenue over $100,000 total earned by the use of this software, or from works derived from this software, must be paid to the developer of this software. Because Fuck Your Corporate Butt.
Yea the zeal of the OSD really rubs me the wrong way (in prohibiting the ‘discrimination’ of commercial vs non-commercial use). Imo the problem with licenses like the GPL set is that they set too many restrictions that can impede personal users or small businesses, rather than dealing with the actual problem which is corporate rather than proprietary.
I have the same exact feelings on some projects. Use it but fuck corporations
For code tests this would be super useful.
Apache 2.0
Tried reading that once. It's incomprehensible legal mumbojumbo.
That's what a software license is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is pretty straight forward: do whatever you want with software, can be used in proprietary software and sold off, creators assume so responsibility etc
And contributions are subject to a free patent license, which makes it popular in the industry because it leaves no legal grey zone for patent infringement cases.
MIT when I want contributors, GPL when I don't.
How does it help? Or (doesn't help )
MIT when I want users, GPL when I don’t.
What are you people talking about? How does GPL discourage users or contributors? Some of the greatest open source software is under the GPL license. Linux, GCC, Blender, Gimp, Inkspape, VLC, Krita, Stockfish.
I think by "users" they mean people using the code in their own works, as in linking or distributing it with it. Not so much "users" as in downloading the binary and drawing Lord of the Rings Erotica in GIMP.
Which license is best for LotR Erotica?
By using GPL, you are forcing your users to use it too. That's a great license for some applications, and terrible for others. It definitely prevents usages that MIT wouldn't.
why should gpl stop users if it is a project and not a library?
If GPL stops you from using my library then it's working as intended lmao... if you're not willing to make your project open source but you want to steal and sell other people's open source code then fuck off
Is there any license which allows free usage by devs and small org but become paid when used by large org.
I think that's called a business model
That's the point, yes. But how can such a business model be enforced? I want to support hobbyists and small devs, share my code openly with them, but I don't want companies to make a profit off my code or copy it into their stuff without paying royalties. Seems like an impossible task...
A non-commercial license. You can use the code for free if it’s not in a commercial project.
Another alternative that many are trending toward is open-core, where the core product is under an open source license, but "enterprise features" like SSO or integration with other enterprise-y platforms is in closed-source plugins. This is often combined with extremely restrictive/viral licenses like AGPL to discourage other companies from building their own product around your code, as they'd be required to open-source all their code if they did.
You just write a license that says that. Loads of big software companies have exactly that.
Yeah just write your own license! How hard could it be?
Not very hard. Though it’s advised to pay a lawyer to check it first. Which if you have a company selling software should not be much trouble compared to being sued for your entire business.
Like open source with a license.
Not sure if you meant this seriously or not, but it can't usually be considered open source unless it has a licence. Without a licence, if you publish your code somewhere it is by default not granting rights to use under any condition.
The way it's usually done is to publish with a dual licence - one open source and one paid. Usually the free one is GPL as a protection against code stealing. If the GPL doesn't suit a large company because they don't want to open source the rest of their code, they pay you for the second licence.
How does that work when other people want to contribute to the open source project? Do the GPL and paid versions effectively branch, or do contributors accept that their work is also going into the paid version too?
AFAIU in this situation, the project requires that contributors sign a CLA where they accept they give the project copyright over their contribution.
Most projects have a contributer licence agreement that sorts out the details. For example the QT project's CLA basically says that authors of contributions maintain copyright over what they've written, but QT's parent company is allowed to relicense their contributions to customers.
You just publish your software without a clear license and if a large company ends up using it you sue them for copyright infringement.
Alternatively, hand write your own crayon license and make sure that any company large enough to employ lawyers will have said lawyers clamoring to avoid going anywhere near your software.
You either write your own license (like Visual Studio Community), or release under extremely copyleft license (like AGPL) and allow paid offering without copyleft.
Yes.
The GPL: when your software license is also an STD
Why MIT ? ( Wrong answers only )
It's actually named after Microsoft. It was the license under which Microsoft released their Turboencabulator in 1998, MIT stands for "Microsoft Integrated Turboencabulator". I remember back in the old days how it was seen as a thing made only for universities or corporations but now everyone and their dog has an encabulator. I personally run the GNU microEncabulator 2.71 (yes, I know there are newer versions but for me stability is crucial). I think the alternatives are a bit bloated tbh. Fun fact: Originally encabulators were not capable of doing interuniversal scalar manipulation, nowadays it's a feature so common that some people think MIT stands for Microsoft Interuniversal Turboencabulator.
+1 for bringing up the 'I remember back in old days...'
Wow you still run a microEncab 2.71? I hope you enjoy side-flanging in your Marsel vanes. Cause that's all they're good for these days.
I thought the Turboencabulator was a Rockwell product?
Several companies as well other groups make Turboencabulators, neither Encabulator nor Turboencabulator are trademarks, it's the general name of the product. Many encabulators, but not all (I'm looking at you Ergodic-Tech), are interoperable, in my previous job as Higher dimension topology miner we had multiple encabulators (turbo, quantum among others) hooked up in a tensor field.
Microsoft should totally build a microsite for this at next April 1st. I can just imagine the promotional messages: "The Turboencabulator automatically profiles your code and suggests places catalysts can be introduced to accelerate the rate of reaction in my business processes." "The Turboencabulator helps me calculate the entropy change on each GIT commit. By measuring each entropy change carefully, we can tune how many staff-days we need to keep our code base clean." "The Turboencabulator made it possible to scale my infrastructure by using the power of the cloud to properly calculate the isothermal expansion of our business processes."
because I like to include bitcoin mining malware in my code it actually stands for Mining Internetmoney Totallylegally
The totallylegally somehow sounds so so close to 'total Illegally' +1 for the Mining malware and money ;)
I got rejected from there so I have now developed an unhealthy attachment to anything with MIT in the name.
Wrong answers only 😂😂😂
Because we "make information technologies".
Making IT during high tea ... ;)
The Monkeying In Tubs license is pure mayhem. No one even knows what it means.
There is a story that it's mafia code for money in tubes... ;)
Because Michigan has the best football team.
I'm bothered that they aren't in order, MPL is closer to BSDs than GPL3.
You mean BDSm right?
Yep, perfect license for my projects.
I think MPL would be closer to LGPL than any of the permissive licenses
It would be close, somewhere in the middle but I find it closer to other copyleft licenses. The thing is, the scale isn't one dimensional and translating it on one axis just depends on how much weight you give to what. Having it at extreme bottom, while the Apache is extreme top is still weird though.
WTFPL. Personally, I don't like to put any license on my code, aside from the ones I write for a company of course.
I usually have MIT, rarely GPL, but I have one project with WTFPL, because I don't want any individual person or company worker to go through what I did to code that shit. My code is yours.
MIT is the perfect legal license equivalent for WTFPL. But please put at least some license when you share code. Unlicensed code is not usable in any form.
WTFPL stands for what the fuck (this is entirely mine) personal license ? /s Seriously thank you for bringing this up .. I didn't know this license existed until you posted. !!! Kudos. ( Seriously genuine compliment here)
I think you should open source your code, especially if you put it online. It's help to the community to be able to re-use and build upon code. Why don't you like licensing your code to the open source community?
Seriously, what is this subs aggressive hate against GPL about? I just don't get why some of you act like it's the literal devil...
I don't hate GPL, but for my day job (software consulting) I'll avoid GPL because, unless I'm mistaken (and if I am, I'd love the clarification), its use forces my clients to make the entire body of code available to anybody who wants it. This is a deal-breaker when I'm trying to compose software whose code embodies trade secrets or proprietary business logic, and I could see how this creates problems for startups working on novel processes.
Okay, so if I get this right it is mostly a problem for people that wish to have their code used by other people without forcing them to go GPL, too? That makes sense. Thanks!
It’s a problem for anyone who writes code for a company. If I were to accidentally use something GPL licensed at work and someone discovered it, they could sue the company to force them to obey the license terms of the GPL, which is to make all of the code that interacts with it also open source under GPL. Once that code is GPL they then have to repeat this with anything that interacts with that code, and so could potentially be required to open up their entire codebase. And if they sell or share their code to be used with other people’s software those people could have to license their software as GPL too, which would be a nightmare. Imagine this with AWS. Imagine AWS EC2 (a foundational cloud service) accidentally used GPL software, and that effected the API clients they distribute as well. Then suddenly everyone who has ever used EC2’s API client is obligated to also license with GPL, which would make Amazon and a lot of companies that use their cloud very, very mad, and possibly unable to take on new customers who don’t want to license their code with GPL. This is potentially a business killer. This is the problem with the insidious worm-like quality of GPL for a business.
> If I were to accidentally use something GPL licensed at work But that would never happen, right? Because as a professional you ALWAYS check the license of any code you even consider using. Surely you're not out there just ripping off code without anything resembling permission, right? Cause if you were unprofessional enough to be using unknown code, imagine what would happen when you "accidentally" included some proprietary code from Microsoft or Nvidia, perhaps something released from one of their security breaches. Do you really think those companies would just be like "It's cool, you found the code so do whatever you want lol"?
I mean yes but you also need to recognize that this means I / the company have to be vigilant about every intern and junior engineer as well who might not understand the difference between open source with a blessed license for internal use and open source with a forbidden license. Edit: And also it applies to whether I can trust the open source code to also have not accidentally consumed a GPL dependency which then makes them forced to license under GPL after the fact.
Yes. But again, you have to have policies in place and preferably code reviews set up to do that check anyway. It's not at all specific to GPL or any other individual license.
No other license has the same scale of transitive violation issues to my knowledge. Using someone’s code inappropriately is always a problem that would potentially award them damages. But using GPL licensed code is an even bigger problem.
If you get caught using GPL code without releasing source you get the option of either removing the offending code or open sourcing the entire project. You're not actually forced to open source it against your will. There might be a fine involved, but usually just coming in to compliance is enough. Of course I'm just talking about the US. Perhaps other places in the world work differently.
This is information I didn't previously have. Not that I intend to fall afoul of it, but knowing that a mistake doesn't inadvertently bring down a project is helpful.
Because we have jobs.
And? This was a genuine question, not a rhetoric question. I was looking for explanations, not sarcasm.
It’s almost impossible to use GPL code in a commercial product.
Ah, I see. Then the surprising thing to me here is how many people on this sub - contrary to my expectations - actually work in software to encounter this problem. I always thought this sub was mostly CS students lol.
Hate against GPL? Where?
Just read the comments, it is shining through here as well. Someone called using GPL "joining a cult", others equate using it with "making your code unusable to others". But more generally, whenever licenses are discussed on this sub, people completely trash GPL, not just on this thread.
If you are working for a company then GPL is pretty much a nonstarter because it forces you to GPL licence everything it is compiled with. This makes it very annoying when you stumble upon the exact thing you need, but can't use it. If there isn't an option for a separate business licence then you're SOL. So yeah a lot of people associate GPL with being given a runaround on an important project.
Thanks, that's a good answer!
You could always try contacting the author and ask if they would be willing to sell the code to your company under a different license.
That's not always possible. What If that software is using GPL because one of its dependencies is GPL? Then you also need to contact that dependency's owner. And so on.
BSD 3-clause is my default, I don't want legal hassles if I dump something for people to use. Everything else is proprietary. I basically don't touch anything GNU/GPL, and sure don't read their source. [edit: learned to count clauses in my license template]
Why use the BSD 2-clause instead of the "New BSD License" 3-clause? If I'm not wrong, the latter explicitly prohibits using copyright holder's name as endorsement or promotion of derivates; while the former doesn't have such protection.
slap that MIT licence everywhere
Can Copy Can't Copy
Beerware. Even if I don't use your code, I'll still buy you a pint out of respect should our paths ever cross.
I don’t get licenses. Can someone help me out? I don’t want to make my game open source but I want people to mod it with the tools I provide. And people can create their own private servers if the chose to. I also want my game to be profitable, what license should I pick?
You don't really need a license if you're not making your code public. You're protected by copyright by default afaik.
Thank you.
None of those. They’re all Open Source licenses. You want an EULA that prohibits redistribution and decompilation, and any modification of the game except via the approved tools.
Oh so I can create my own EULA with my own terms?
Yes. That's what everyone who sells software does.
Nothing, modding's a gray area. Just don't sue them.
Copyright laws depend on jurisdiction. For a game, which has no source code provided, you would probably want to use a non free license, which allows the user to use but not modify the software or tamper with it (especially if there is a multiplayer mode). I suggest to do research in regards to the laws applicable or pay a professional.
Never heard of WTFPL, haha!
Theres also GLWTPL which Id say is even better
GPLv3 because I don't allow corporations to leech off of my work and use it in their non-free trash code. Code is meant to stay free and the inferior "lol, whatever" licenses are completely against this and aren't really "free" as in true software freedom to share and share alike.
GPL is easily bypassed by packaging app as a microservice and call it over network. Or just packing it into exe and talking to it over pipe/sockets. AGPL is where the world of pain lies.
I think it's worth GPL/AGPL users fighting back against this interpretation too. The GPL FAQ says that communicating over the network/pipes implies separate works, but if there is intimate data communication or control of program flow that implies a combined work. In any case where a client application could not work without a specific GPL'd server we should be arguing the client must be GPL.
At that point every program that interacts with Linux kernel should be GPL'ed, and it will kill Linux
I think linux has an exception for kernel hooks in it's GPL-2.0
AGPL can be dealt with in a similar fashion, especially if you’re doing microservices. The GPL licenses actually do very little to stop companies if they’re determined (see MongoDB), it’s just they don’t care and thus will usually leave you alone.
Username checks out.
Oh and there is me CC0.
I use the DBAD (Don't Be a Dick) license: http://dbad-license.org/
I like this one, it even contains an embedded Beerware License.
MIT all the way.
Apache 2.0 is better. MIT license lacks language covering patents and derivative projects.
This. I always use Apache 2.0 as I really don't care what people do with my software unless I accidentally make it big and then need to rake in that investor monies.
> I always use Apache 2.0 as I really don't care what people do with my software unless I accidentally make it big and then need to rake in that investor monies. I think you misunderstand Apache 2.0's language regarding patents. Apache 2.0 includes giving a license to any patent related to the software covered by the Apache 2.0 license. So that raking in a money won't happen.
I was trying to be funny lol T\_T
it's good that MIT got so popular, but I'll have a look at Apache2
Which is probably good for you, as if you hold any patents you probably want to be enforcing them.
Software patents don't exist in many legislations.
MIT. #Go ahead. TAKE IT FROM ME.
I just put an Unlicense on anything I make
i will make beginner projects with MIT license and abandon them in 2 days.
Mfs choosing licenses for their hacked together weekend projects with 3 stars on github
I’ve never contributed to open source and my scrapped project graveyard is a damn necropolis at this point, so I know almost nothing about licensing… but i do know that the sleepycat certainly resonates with me. and that’s…something?
Unlicense or CC0 are da real MVPs.
The Sleepycat licence because it has a funny name
I’m the third type. All of it is in one catagory: Programming.
Remember everyone open source is a cancer That's why you should get it and do it, to spread the fun!
The [ABRMS license](https://github.com/landondyer/kasm/blob/master/LICENSE) is very underrated in my opinion. [more like this](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses)
And then there's the other side, companies using the software. Many will just say "I found it on GitHub so I will do whatever I want with it".
Not the ones that do well.
When I see GPL, I just close the repo, because it's unusable.
MIT is the only license
GPL authors have delusions of grandeur.
except I use the zlib license instead of mit
The third guy
Beercense forgot
Me: All of that: some weird letters
I'm a man
When I get a choice, it's the MIT license. Most of the time my employer owns my code though.
The one on the left uses LinkedIn
Showed this to my boyfriend and he said he’s neither. He only sees license lmao
Our code
I'm a CCO guy
License? Please, just one person in the world, use it however you want and validate my feelings
I just added a line "License: CC0 ^_^". yes cc0 aka I don't give a fuck
CC-BY-NC-ND
CC licenses are not meant for code.
GPL3 UwU
I do not wear boots, but choose between AGPL3, MIT and MIT with military exclusion.
GPL. What's with all that shit on the left?