Re: License survey

[Solar Designer <solar@openwall.com>]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 05:03:08PM +0100, aep wrote:
> GPL is a way to piss of the nice people and ineffective for the evil 
> ones.

There are also nice people among proprietary software makers.  GPL works
to have them ask for an explicit commercial license (and offer something
in return).

> In my opinion LGPL only makes sense if you want to go for dual 
> licensing, selling the more liberal one for actual money.

That's a primary reason why I keep John the Ripper under GPLv2; for my
other software where I do not have such intent and do not mean to
discourage proprietary derivative works, I use 0-clause BSD now.

> That's a tiny 
> bit more complicated (reasigning every contribution, yadda yadda), but 
> worth it.

Copyright assignments have to be "in writing" (at least per US copyright
law), which may discourage many contributors.  Instead, I am considering
asking JtR contributors to license some of their contributions to me or
to Openwall with right to sublicense to arbitrary third-parties.  For
other contributions, which are more independent from the rest of the
code (separate source files), we use 0-clause BSD.  (The current major
contributors appear to be OK with these things.)  Things get pretty
complicated, though.  So I do not really recommend GPL for musl.

> If you're 100% 
> sure you want to continue this as a 'hacker project', go 
> MIT/BSD/whatever.

I second this.  In fact, being "100% sure" does not have to be a requirement.

Alexander